J. Trent Alexander

University of Michigan | U-M · Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research

Multiple recent linkage efforts have produced longitudinal individual-level data from the censuses of 1850-1940. In addition, within the Census Bureau’s restricted data program, respondents can be linked anonymously between the censuses of 1940, 2000, 2010, and 2020. Researchers are already using parts of these infrastructures together to conduct l...

This paper presents methods to assign contemporaneous geographic variables to recently recovered historical tax data. We explore various approaches to assign census tract variables to address-level data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from the 1960s-1980s, with the goal of documenting this extraordinary data resource and preparing the files...

Social scientists' use of linked decennial census data has grown extensively over the past two decades. For U.S. census data before 1950, a large body of linked data has been made available within the past few years. The 2000 and 2010 decennial data have been linked to one another and back to the 1940 Census. For the censuses in between these years...

While the U.S. Census Bureau has microdata files from the 1960 through 1990 Decennial Censuses, respondent names were never digitized. Names from these censuses are only available in handwritten form on microfilm images of the original census manuscripts. In this paper, we document the 1990 Census Name Recovery Pilot (NRP) project, which was used t...

The Great Migration from the South and the rise of racial residential segregation strongly shaped the twentieth-century experience of African Americans. Yet, little attention has been devoted to how the two phenomena were linked, especially with respect to the individual experiences of the migrants. We address this gap by using novel data that link...

The U.S. Census Bureau maintains a large longitudinal research infrastructure that currently includes linked data from the 1940 census, the 2000-2010 censuses, major national surveys going back to 1973, and administrative records dating back to the 1990s. These restricted data are accessible to researchers around the U.S. via the Federal Statistica...

This report documents the findings of “Identification, Monitoring, and Preservation of Government Data Resources”, an 18-month project involving outreach to government data producers, users, and intermediaries. Through this project, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) sought to identify stakeholders’ most-used...

Using novel panel data spanning 1940–2000, we examine the adult offspring of the Great Migration who returned to the South. We observe two types of return migrants: (1)southern-born, “lifetime” return migrants who were born in the South, resided outside of the South in 1940, and returned to the South by 2000, and (2)northern-born, “generational” re...

The U.S. Census Bureau has created a set of linkable census, survey, and administrative records that provides longitudinal data on the American population across the past eight decades. While these files include modern decennial censuses, Census Bureau surveys, and administrative records files from other federal agencies, the long time span is only...

ICPSR is building LinkageLibrary, a repository and community space for researchers involved in linking and combining datasets, as a collaboration between social, statistical, and computer scientists. Unlike surveys or experiments where causal and outcome variables are measured in tandem, it is often necessary when working with organic, non-design d...

Introduction Population data capture children, parents, relatives, and others moving in and out of households. The U.S. has seen falling marriage rates, and increases in multigenerational households and complex families, young children living with grandparents, and adult children living with parents. Robust parent-child linkages are critical to und...

IntroductionAccess to real data with diverse attributes is critical for effective development of any data analytic algorithm. Benchmarking data repositories have all been vital to the development of research communities focused on algorithm development. This work reports on the development of such a data repository for record linkage. Objectives an...

History: Those undertaking the Great Migration left the South in search of a better life, and their move transformed the cultural, social, and political dynamics of African American life specifically and U.S. society more generally. Recent research offers conflicting evidence regarding the migrants' success in translating their geographic mobility...

If we want to build authentic evidence-based policy, we need a strong descriptive foundation of evidence on the everyday experience of poverty. The National Poverty Study (NPS), which is currently in development, provides this foundation with a new “qualitative census” of the everyday conditions of poverty in rural, suburban, and urban sites. The N...

Ernest George Ravenstein’s influential “laws of migration” argued that short-distance and within-country moves were typically dominated by women. We use census microdata to take a fresh look at the relationship between gender and internal migration in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America. We argue that there was a significant flaw in Ra...

Ernest George Ravenstein’s influential “laws of migration” argued that short-distance and within-country moves were typically dominated by women. We use census micro-data to take a fresh look at the relationship between gender and internal migration in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America. We argue that there was a significant fla...

This paper estimates and interprets empirical shifts in the gender composition of immigrants to add to scholarship about the gendering of international migrations over time. We map shifts in gender ratios using micro-level data that permit us to create age-standardized estimates among adult foreign born stock living in the United States since 1850...

In this article, the authors describe a collaboration of the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), the U.S. Census Bureau, and the National Archives and Records Administration to restore the lost data from the 1960 Census. The data survived on refrigerated microfilm in a cave in Lenexa, Kansas. The MPC is now converting the data to usable form. Once t...

We discover and document errors in public-use microdata samples (“PUMS files”) of the 2000 Census, the 2003–2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004–2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men age 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15 percent from counts in published...

The migration of millions of southerners out of the South between 1910 and 1970 is largely attributed to economic and social push factors in the South, combined with pull factors in other regions of the country. Researchers generally find that participants in this migration were positively selected from their region of origin, in terms of education...

We examine the physical and mental health effects of providing care to an elderly mother on the adult child caregiver. We address the endogeneity of the selection in and out of caregiving using an instrumental variable approach, and carefully control for baseline health and work status of the adult child using fixed effects and Arellano-Bond estima...

Virtually all quantitative microdata used by social scientists derive from samples that incorporate clustering, stratification, and weighting adjustments (Kish 1965, 1992). Such data can yield standard error estimates that differ dramatically from those derived from a simple random sample of the same size. Researchers using historical U.S. census m...

New scholarship on southern white out-migration challenges long-held views regarding the economic difficulties experienced by Appalachian white migrants in the North. A comparison of the experiences of Appalachian white migrants and other southern white migrants during a forty-year period, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series files (IPU...

This article considers the incidence and meaning of return migration that took place during the twentieth-century "Great Migration" of southern whites and African-Americans to the U.S. North and West. Southern whites in particular had an unusually high rate of return, though this pattern varied significantly from one northern city to another. After...

The authors describe a public use microdata sample of the 1860 slave population of the United States recently created at the Minnesota Population Center. They discuss the key substantive issues that quantitative historians are likely to address with the data set, such as the demography of slavery, patterns in slave-holding, and miscegenation. They...

Journal of Social History 35.3 (2002) 762-763 In the last few decades scholars have pieced together a dramatically new understanding of the meaning of past migrations. The old story held that industry pulled recently dispossessed rural people to the city, where -- along with deskilled artisans -- they became part of a growing urban industrial prole...

Sociologists, demographers, and historians of the last few decades have pieced together a dramatically new understanding of the meaning of past migrations. The old story held that industry pulled recently dispossessed rural people to the city, where—along with deskilled artisans—they became part of a growing urban industrial proletariat. For migran...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carnegie Mellon University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 324-343).