Age distribution adjustments for English censuses, 1821 to 1931

Abstract

We use Demeny and Shorter's method, and some modifications of it, to derive estimates of adjustment coefficients to the distribution of women's ages for the English censuses of 1821, and 1841–1931, and to estimate mortality and fertility for the intercensal quinquennia 1841–1871. For 1861/71 we also derive adjustment factors for the age distribution of men. We find that initially women aged 20–24, but not men, were over-enumerated by eight or nine per cent. Both sexes were drastically under-enumerated at age 55–59, by up to 14 per cent. We find very severe over-enumeration of the aged, by between one-third and one-half or even more for those aged 80 and over durng the nineteenth century. Age distortion declines gradually towards zero over this period. Results of nominal linkage studies appear consistent with ours. Estimated vital rates likewise are consistent with other sources.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.