Progress Report, February 2003

The North Atlantic Population Project was funded by the National Science Foundation from mid-2001, following earlier discussions among representatives of the five countries involved (see our Background page for more details).

Principal investigators and project leaders from all five countries met in Minneapolis for two days in November 2001 to discuss data cleaning issues, and plan the work of the project over the next year. Following this meeting, Lisa Dillon, Marianne JarnÊs-Erikstad, Evan Roberts, Chad Ronnander, Gunnar Thorvaldsen, and Matthew Woollard met for a further eight days to discuss revisions to the HISCO occupational classification system for use in coding NAPP data. Our work in revising HISCO for use in NAPP continued throughout 2002, and is nearing completion in preparation for an initial release of harmonized data in summer 2003. Further information on our work revising HISCO is available in the Winter 2002 issue of Historical Methods.1

Representatives from all countries and projects met again in Iceland in October 2002 for the annual NAPP planning meeting. At this meeting we neared completion of our revisions to the HISCO occupational classification system, and planned a release schedule of harmonized data. Shortly after our Iceland meeting, NAPP representatives met again informally at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (SSHA) in St. Louis. The SSHA program featured one session devoted entirely to NAPP ("The North Atlantic Population Project: Methods and Prospects"), and we presented a paper about NAPP in another SSHA session on international and comparative census and survey data projects.

Throughout 2001 and 2002, the individual country projects have continued to prepare their data for release in a harmonized format. This strand of work has received separate funding from other agencies, as the NAPP grant from the National Science Foundation covers only the work involved in harmonizing the datasets. Principally, this work has involved correcting errors in the transcription and organization of the data, and translating variables which are currently alphabetic strings into numerically coded form to make them tractable for social science research.

We are currently planning an initial release of harmonized data in summer 2003. This release will include data from Canada, Great Britain, Norway, and the United States, and be available through the same form of extract system used for distributing IPUMS-International data. This release will include the core demographic and work variables available in two or more countries.

Further preliminary releases of harmonized data are planned throughout the life of the project, with the final release of harmonized data scheduled for summer 2005.

Notes
  1. Evan Roberts, Matthew Woollard, Chad Ronnander, Lisa Dillon, and Gunnar Thorvaldsen (2002) ìOccupational Classification in the the North Atlantic Population Projectî, Historical Methods, 36(1).
Progress Report