Research report 2022 - Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
What data from online genealogies reveal about historical life expectancy
Authors
Alburez-Gutierrez, Diego; Stelter, Robert
Departments
Max-Planck-Forschungsgruppe „Ungleichheiten in Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen“ (Alburez-Gutierrez)
Arbeitsbereich „Fertilität und Wohlbefinden“ am Max-Planck-Institut für demografische Forschung, Rostock; Max Geldner Assistenzprofessor für quantitative Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Universität Basel (Stelter)
Arbeitsbereich „Fertilität und Wohlbefinden“ am Max-Planck-Institut für demografische Forschung, Rostock; Max Geldner Assistenzprofessor für quantitative Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Universität Basel (Stelter)
Summary
Online genealogy data are beset by a number of biases that affect their representativity. Diego Alburez-Gutierrez from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and his colleague Robert Stelter show this with the example of a user-generated dataset from the FamiLinx project. They calculate the remaining life expectancy of men aged 30 who lived in the German Empire between 1500 and 1910 and the Netherlands between 1600 and 1909. Their work highlights the need to develop bias-correction methods to analyze historical population trends derived from crowdsourced digital data.