New Sources for Comparative Social Science: Historical Population Panel Data From East Asia

Comparison and comparability lie at the heart of any comparative social science. Still, precise comparison is virtually impossible without using similar methods and similar data. In recent decades, social demographers, historians, and economic historians have compiled and made available a large numb...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Demography 2015-06, Vol.52 (3), p.1061-1088
Main Authors: Dong, Hao, Campbell, Cameron, Kurosu, Satomi, Yang, Wenshan, Lee, James Z.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Databases as Topic - statistics & numerical data
Datasets
Demography
Demography - statistics & numerical data
Far East
Fertility
Geography
Historians
Historical analysis
Households
Humans
Medicine/Public Health
Population
Population Dynamics - statistics & numerical data
Population Economics
Science
Social research
Social Sciences
Social Sciences - statistics & numerical data
Sociology
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Comparison and comparability lie at the heart of any comparative social science. Still, precise comparison is virtually impossible without using similar methods and similar data. In recent decades, social demographers, historians, and economic historians have compiled and made available a large number of micro-level data sets of historical populations for North America and Europe. Studies using these data have already made important contributions to many academic disciplines. In a similar spirit, we introduce five new microlevel historical panel data sets from East Asia, including the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) 1749-1909, the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC) 1866-1913, the Japanese Ninbetsu-Aratame-Cho Population Register Database-Shimomoriya and Niita (NAC-SN) 1716-1870, the Korea Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Tansung (KMGPD-TS) 1678-1888, and the Colonial Taiwan Household Registration Database (CTHRD) 1906-1945. These data sets in total contain more than 3.7 million linked observations of 610,000 individuals and are the first such Asian data to be made available online or by application. We discuss the key features and historical institutions that originally collected these data; the subsequent processes by which the data were reconstructed into individual-level panels; their particular data limitations and strengths; and their potential for comparative social scientific research.
ISSN:0070-3370
1533-7790
DOI:10.1007/s13524-015-0397-y