A New Strategy for Linking U.S. Historical Censuses: A Case Study for the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel.

Journal: Historical methods
Published Date: Nov 11, 2021

Abstract

This paper presents a probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to many sources of digitized historical records. The method links records using a two-step approach, first establishing high confidence matches among men by exploiting a comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics. The method then proceeds to link both men and women by leveraging links between households established in the first step. While only the first stage links can be directly comparable to other popular methods in research on the U.S., our method yields both considerably higher linkage rates and greater accuracy while only performing negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

Authors

  • Jonas Helgertz
    Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation and Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota.
  • Joseph Price
    Department of Economics, Brigham Young University.
  • Jacob Wellington
    Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation and Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota.
  • Kelly J Thompson
    Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation and Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota.
  • Steven Ruggles
    Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation and Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota.
  • Catherine A Fitch
    Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation and Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota.

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