Full Citation

Title: Introduction: The Canadian Families Project

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2001

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI: 10.1177/036319900102600201

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Abstract: The articles in this issue are the work of members of the Canadian Families Project (CFP), a collaborative project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.1 Although six articles cannot reflect the full range of the research being carried out by a team of fourteen scholars, they reveal something of the scope and diversity of our multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach to the history of families and households in Canada. We began in 1996 with a shared belief that the historical study of family in Canada required new empirical foundations, a more concentrated application of methods already applied by historians in other countries, and a team effort. We began with a shared interest in seeing what would happen when different disciplines—history, geography, sociology, anthropology—were brought to bear upon shared sources, a single geopolitical space, and the same time period (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). We shared an interest in breaking down barriers between cultural historians who used textual sources, social scientists who applied quantitative methods to routinely generated information, and historical geographers who mapped the spatial contours of family and household. We shared a belief that the impressive Canadian work on family and household could be better connected to the international scholarly literature in the field.2 Many of us shared an interest in informing public debates on family at a time when politicians and pundits often appeal to the past, invoking family forms and family values alleged to be traditional. Much of the project’s intellectual energy has focused on a shared database: we began by creating a national sample of individuals and households from the census enumeration of 1901.3 A national sample would afford a new perspective on regional patterns within Canada and allow comparisons with wider North American patterns. Before the CFP created its sample of the 1901 census . . .

Url: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/036319900102600201

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Authors: Sager, Eric, W

Periodical (Full): Journal of Family History

Issue: 2

Volume: 26

Pages: 157-161

Data Collections: IPUMS International

Topics: Family and Marriage, Other, Work, Family, and Time

Countries: Canada