Where are all the prostitutes in the census records of London 1881? In her book, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women Class and the State , Judith Walkowitz says that a 19th century city like London (where prostitution was legal) had one prostitute per 36 inhabitants. Based on the 1881 London population records, that amounts to about 24,000 prostitutes. The coded occupations in 1881 London data, however, show no signs of prostitutes anywhere.
Family-member characteristics are often related to individual outcomes. The IPUMS data extract system makes it easy for you to include in your datasets variables that describe other household members, such as age of mother, occupation of father, or educational attainment of spouse.
In April, MPC Director of Data Integration Matt Sobek was invited to speak at an event for the United Nations’ 49th Session of the Commission on Population and Development. The special session, “The Data Revolution in Action: National and International Experiences with Microdata Dissemination and Public Use,” was created to show attendees examples of national and international organizations distributing data for public use.
A year ago, the MPC’s Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) project launched their IHIS Data Briefs. IHIS offers an integrated version of the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS). “The data briefs were a natural fit for the NHIS data,” says Julia Rivera Drew, co-principal investigator of IHIS and co-author of the Data Briefs. “We realized that there were great resources that were going underutilized in NHIS and this provided a way to let users know the contents of the database. The briefs allow us to introduce topics that our users may have been interested in, but didn’t know we covered.” The briefs have also helped Drew and her colleagues reach out to new kinds of users.
In research published earlier this year, two MPC researchers found that married couples in the U.S. are happier and more fulfilled when they are together rather than apart, underscoring the importance of spending time with a spouse for individual well-being.
NHGIS recently launched a pair of web maps highlighting the available GIS files and striking changes in boundaries over time for two popular geographic levels. The ‘Census Tract’ map displays data for years 1910 to 2014, and the ‘Place’ map depicts data for 1980 to 2014. With each year listed as a separate layer, users can easily toggle specific years on and off to visualize the data.
Associate Professor of History and MPC Faculty Member J. David Hacker made headlines in 2011 when he published a groundbreaking study of the total number of U.S. Civil War dead. Hacker argued that the widely-accepted figure of 620,000 was far too low. Using IPUMS, Hacker showed that the number of dead was at least 750,000—if not more. His article, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War,” published in Civil War History, was introduced by the editors in the issue as “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages.”
Few demographic historians expect attention from mainstream press when they publish their research, but Hacker’s study attracted national interest, including interviews with the New York Times and National Public Radio.