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Title: Spatial variation in historical household formation markers: testing John Hajnal's hypothesis with geographically weighted correlation
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: In this article, we provide the first comprehensive and pan-European empirical assessment of the relationships between four markers of household formation systems, as theorised by J. Hajnal in his 1982 seminal paper. Using an unprecedented family history database, the four markers of Hajnal’s household formation rules were operationalised for 256 regional rural populations from Catalonia to central Siberia between 1700 and 1926. In order to examine the meso-level relationships between these markers across these different areas, we employ an explicit, spatially sensitive descriptive analysis based on the Geographically Weighted Spearman’s rank order correlation. Our analysis demonstrates that mutual associations between nuclear household structure, service, headship, and marriage exhibit considerable spatial drifts (sign reversal) or important spatial gradients (magnitude change), and that the resulting number of their joint combinations far exceeds the scenarios that either Hajnal or his critics have been able to identify. By uncovering the spatially contingent associations between the different household formation traits, the innovative research presented in this paper provides support for the suggestion that Hajnal’s model is a gross simplification of historical reality that should be approached with caution.
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Authors: Szołtysek, Mikołaj
Series Title: MOSAIC WORKING PAPERS
Publication Number: 2019-002
Institution: MOSAIC
Pages: 43
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Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Housing and Segregation, Population Data Science
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