M.Sc. Defence: Shada Omar Zarti

Title: Identifying Households for Historical Censuses to Generate Longitudinal Data

Chair: Dr. Stacey Scott
Advisor: Dr. Luiza Antonie
Committee Member: Dr. Kris Inwood
Non-Advisory Committee Member: Dr. David Calvert

Abstract:

The availability of historical census data and advances in automatic record linking techniques provide social scientists and historians with research opportunities based on longitudinal data. Automatically linking the same individuals and households in multiple sources creates longitudinal data more quickly and with less effort. The most common way to do this is to link individual records (pair-wise linkage) in sources such a census. More recently a strategy of linking groups of individual census records (e.g., households) has been used. Unfortunately, in some historical censuses, household identifiers (HID) were not recorded at the time of the enumeration or not transcribed into the digital collections. In this thesis, we link individual records in four full historical censuses of Canada (1871, 1881, 1891, and 1901) using both pair-wise and group-linkage methods. HID are available from the original enumerations of 1871 and 1881, but not for 1891 and 1901. Hence, we develop and implement a method to automatically identify HID in the 1891 and 1901 censuses. We use these new data to generate longitudinal data that follows 159,872 Canadians over three decades from 1871 to 1901.