George Alter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 170143 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | George Alter |
| NOMBRES | George |
| APELLIDO | Alter |
| FIRMA | ALTER G |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3823-4972 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 207 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 49 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1981 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Balancing economic stress
The role of deaths following childbirth in sex differences in mortality
In historical populations, death rates for females often exceeded those of males in reproductive ages. However, childbirth-related deaths were not the only cause of excess mortality among adult women. This study expands on work by Schofield and colleagues by re-examining mortality after childbirth in the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions. Part 1 applies event history methods in a new way to focus on excess mortality following childbirth. Unl…
Pensions and household structure
The Impact of Multiple Births on Fertility
Multiple births strain mothers’ and families’ resources in ways that should highlight preferences for family size, birth spacing, and parity-dependent stopping behavior. Couples with surviving twins reach their target family size sooner than other couples and should be more likely to practice family limitation. Twins are also a greater burden on the mother's time and health, which could lead to postponing the next birth, even among couples who wa…
Introduction
In recent years the development of historical databases reconstructing the lives of large populations accelerated. These considerable investments of time and money have greatly expanded possibilities for new research in history, demography, sociology, economics, and other disciplines. This special issue describes the content and design of 23 important historical databases. Authors were given the freedom to discuss a range of practical and technic…
Reflections on the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS)
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) encourages sharing historical life course data by storing data in a common format. To encompass the complexity of life histories, IDS relies on data structures that are unfamiliar to most social scientists. This article examines four features of IDS that make it flexible and expandable: the Entity-Attribute-Value model, the relational database model, embedded metadata, and the Chronicle file. I also consider …
Re-introducing the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions
English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality. To expand their availability the family reconstituti…
The Evolution of Models in Historical Demography
Historical demography is in transition from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. Previous generations relied on demographic models to squeeze as much information as possible from the small amounts of data available. In this new era of large data sets, researchers are creating both regional and international historical data sets of unprecedented size and depth. When examined closely, however, the regression methods used today make the same simp…
IDS Transposer
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) provides a standard format for storing and sharing individual-level longitudinal life-course data (Alter and Mandemakers 2014; Alter, Mandemakers and Gutmann 2009). Once the data are in the IDS format, a standard set of programs can be used to extract data for analysis, facilitating the analysis of data across multiple databases. Currently, life-course databases store information in a variety of formats, and …
Promoting an open research culture
Author guidelines for journals could help to promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility
Addressing Global Data Sharing Challenges
This issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics highlights the ethical issues that arise when researchers conducting projects in low- and middle-income countries seek to share the data they produce. Although sharing data is considered a best practice, the barriers to doing so are considerable and there is a need for guidance and examples. To that end, the authors of this article reviewed the articles in this special issue…
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) for Longitudinal Historical Microdata, version 4
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) is a standard data format that has been adopted by several large longitudinal databases on historical populations. Since the publication of the first version in Historical Social Research in 2009, two improved and extended versions have been published in the Collaboratory Historical Life Courses. In this publication we present version 4 which is the latest ‘official’ standard of the IDS. Discussions with user…
Data Access and Research Transparency in the Quantitative Tradition
The number of people conducting scientific analyses and the number of topics being studied are higher than ever. At the same time, there are questions about the public value of social scientific endeavors, particularly of federally funded quantitative research (Prewitt 2013). In this article, we contend that data access and research transparency are essential to the public value of the enterprise as a whole and to the credibility of the growing n…
Generation to Generation
After two centuries of demographic change, societies of European origin face a new reality of aging populations and heightened competition for resources between young and old. Research on the history of the family adds important perspectives on our current problems. In northwestern Europe, transfers of resources to the young and old were constrained by an unusual marriage and household formation system. The transition to small families increased …
Introduction
Understanding the complexity of the historical demographic transition-the secular change from high to low levels of mortality and fertility in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-has long been a major goal of historical demography. Recent developments in individual-level life-course databases and longitudinal statistical models have allowed scholars to test ever-more complex hypotheses about the caus…
Prudence and Pressure
Effets de fratrie et mobilité sociale intergénérationnelle dans la Belgique urbaine et rurale au xixe siècle
Creusee par les scientifiques depuis plus d'un siecle, la question des relations entre fecondite et mobilite sociale est compliquee. Elle concerne des individus et des familles dans des cadres macro structurels qui ont ete bouleverses par la transition demographique et la modernisation economique. Les analyses presentees dans cet article se situent au coeur de ces mutations, dans le contexte d'un des berceaux de la revolution industrielle sur le …
Completing Life Histories with Imputed Exit Dates
Life histories can often be reconstructed from administrative sources and other documents that report specific events, like birth, death, visiting a physician, applying for insurance, or using a service. In a passive system, individuals are not under continuous surveillance, and subjects are only known to be present when an event occurs. When individuals move out of the registration area without reporting their movements, the censoring times for …
Compléter les histoires de vie par imputation des dates de sortie d'observation. Une méthode adaptée aux données historiques
Les biographies sont souvent construites à partir de sources administratives et d'autres documents qui témoignent d'événements particuliers comme une naissance, un décès, une visite chez le médecin, une demande de contrat d'assurance ou le recours à un service. Dans un système d'« enregistrement passif », les individus ne sont pas observés de façon continue, mais lorsqu'un événement se produit. Quand une personne quitte la zone couverte par le sy…
Effects of Inheritance and Environment on the Heights of Brothers in Nineteenth-Century Belgium
Widowhood, family size, and post-reproductive Mortality
Researchers from a number of disciplines have offered competing theories about the effects of childbearing on parents’ postreproductive longevity. The “disposable soma theory” argues that investments in somatic maintenance increase longevity but reduce childbearing. “Maternal depletion” models suggest that the rigors of childrearing increase mortality in later years. Other researchers consider continued childbearing a sign of healthy aging and a …
Childhood conditions, migration, and mortality
Migrants often have lower mortality than natives in spite of relatively unfavorable social and economic characteristics. Although migrants have a short-run advantage due to the selective migration of healthy workers, persistent health and mortality differences between migrants and natives may be long-run effects of different experiences in childhood. We made use of a natural experiment resulting from rural-to-urban migration in the mid-19th centu…
Unequal Health
The tools, causes of death age and sex race and poverty lifestyle and health behavior medical care genes stress social inequality population health policy
Height, wealth and longevity in xixth century East Belgium
Les épidémiologistes et les démographes ont pendant longtemps suspecté les conditions de vie et de maladie au cours de l'enfance d'influencer la mortalité ultérieure, mais il a été difficile de faire la part entre les effets de ces conditions et les autres facteurs s'exerçant sur la santé. Les enfants élevés dans les familles pauvres connaissent plus fréquemment que les autres une situation économique très difficile au cours de leur âge adulte ma…
Stature in Transition
Eastern Belgium provides a range of examples of early industrialization. In the nineteenth century, well-established proto-industrial textile and iron production was replaced by mechanization in rapidly growing cities. In this article we examine the consequences of this transition on heights of young men in seven communities with contrasting histories. Men in this area were unusually short in the early nineteenth century, but the trend was strong…
Family and the Female Life Course. The Women of Verviers, Belgium, 1849-1880
The tension between women s workplace opportunity and family obligation is not exclusively a phenomenon of the 1980s, as George Alter makes abundantly clear in this study. His close investigation of women s lives in a nineteenth-century European industrial city advances our knowledge in several areas of social history, historical demography, and life course studies. It is the first monograph to apply event history analysis to the study of family …
Height, frailty, and the standard of living
Explanations of historical trends in both mortality and human height differ over the relative contributions of better nutrition and reduced exposure to disease. This paper explores theoretical models in which interactions between diet and disease determine both mortality and height. One model assumes that adult height is directly related to frailty, the relative risk of dying. The second model links frailty to differences between attained and pot…
Widowhood, family size, and post-reproductive Mortality
Researchers from a number of disciplines have offered competing theories about the effects of childbearing on parents’ postreproductive longevity. The “disposable soma theory” argues that investments in somatic maintenance increase longevity but reduce childbearing. “Maternal depletion” models suggest that the rigors of childrearing increase mortality in later years. Other researchers consider continued childbearing a sign of healthy aging and a …
Studying Causes of Death in the Past
The authors provide an overview of articles in this issue of Historical Methods which is devoted to new approaches to the historical study of causes of death. Topics covered include cause-of-death registration in the past assessing long-term changes in causes of death and suggestions for future research directions. (ANNOTATION)
Frailty, Sickness, and Death
Insurance records from historical sources and recent health surveys suggest that movements in mortality and morbidity are inversely related. Data from nineteenth century England show increases in the prevalence of sickness at all adult ages at the same time that death rates were falling. This paper examines theoretical models which relate movements in mortality and morbidity. The heterogeneous ‘frailty’ model proposed by Vaupel, Manton, and Stall…
Childhood conditions, migration, and mortality
Migrants often have lower mortality than natives in spite of relatively unfavorable social and economic characteristics. Although migrants have a short-run advantage due to the selective migration of healthy workers, persistent health and mortality differences between migrants and natives may be long-run effects of different experiences in childhood. We made use of a natural experiment resulting from rural-to-urban migration in the mid-19th centu…
The Evolution of Models in Historical Demography
Historical demography is in transition from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. Previous generations relied on demographic models to squeeze as much information as possible from the small amounts of data available. In this new era of large data sets, researchers are creating both regional and international historical data sets of unprecedented size and depth. When examined closely, however, the regression methods used today make the same simp…
The European marriage pattern as solution and problem
The essay considers the effects of marriage patterns on the support of the elderly with empirical evidence from Verviers, a small industrial city in nineteenth-century Belgium. The (Northwest) European Marriage Pattern offered a solution for those elderly who had children, especially those with large families, because coresidence with children was the main source of support. The larger community experienced a problem...in the form of large number…
Effects of Inheritance and Environment on the Heights of Brothers in Nineteenth-Century Belgium
Unequal Health
The tools, causes of death age and sex race and poverty lifestyle and health behavior medical care genes stress social inequality population health policy
Stature in Transition
Eastern Belgium provides a range of examples of early industrialization. In the nineteenth century, well-established proto-industrial textile and iron production was replaced by mechanization in rapidly growing cities. In this article we examine the consequences of this transition on heights of young men in seven communities with contrasting histories. Men in this area were unusually short in the early nineteenth century, but the trend was strong…
Classifying the Dead
GEORGE C. ALTER, ANN G. CARMICHAEL; Classifying the Dead: Toward a History of the Registration of Causes of Death, Journal of the History of Medicine and A
Reflections on the classification of causes of death
On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of Causes of Death’, with funding from the US National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The conference brought together historians of medicine and historically-oriented demographers and epidemiologists to discuss the origins of the recording of causes of death and the possible uses of these documents i…
Working Class Debt in the Late Nineteenth Century United States
Children's wages played a central role in family economic strategies in the late nineteenth century. The family budgets collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1889-1890 show that life-cycle patterns of savings and debt varied by industry depending upon incomes from children. The consumption patterns of families whose expenditures exceeded their incomes do not show signs of economic distress, and most families whose annual budget was in de…
The Savings of Ordinary Americans
We explore the savings behavior of ordinary Americans through their accounts at the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, the oldest mutual savings bank in the United States. Our sample contains all 2,374 accounts opened in 1850. Savings accounts were generally brief affairs, but median balances mounted to about three-quarters of annual income in three years. Deposits and withdrawals were infrequent, but substantial. Only female servants, as a group,…
New Perspectives on European Marriage in the Nineteenth Century
In recent years, the research inspired by John Hajnal's hypothesis concerning European marriage has been followed by work on the balance between population and resources and on the prevalence of the nuclear family in Europe. These new directions have raised questions about the Hajnal hypothesis and a number of them are dealt with by the articles in the present collection
Agricultural productivity, partible inheritance, and the demographic response to rural poverty
Data Access and Research Transparency in the Quantitative Tradition
The number of people conducting scientific analyses and the number of topics being studied are higher than ever. At the same time, there are questions about the public value of social scientific endeavors, particularly of federally funded quantitative research (Prewitt 2013). In this article, we contend that data access and research transparency are essential to the public value of the enterprise as a whole and to the credibility of the growing n…
Introduction
Understanding the complexity of the historical demographic transition-the secular change from high to low levels of mortality and fertility in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-has long been a major goal of historical demography. Recent developments in individual-level life-course databases and longitudinal statistical models have allowed scholars to test ever-more complex hypotheses about the caus…
Work and Income in the Family Economy
During the last twenty years the focus of research on the workingclass family has undergone an important shift. Most previous scholarship emphasized the physical and moral hardships of women and children in factories which had been so luridly detailed by contemporary reformers. More recent work does not belittle the hardships experienced in early industrialization, but rather emphasizes the positive and essential economic contributions of women a…
Plague and the Amsterdam annuitant
A great deal of information about mortality can be found in the records of life annuities which were sold by governments in early modern Europe. Analysis of life annuities sold in Amsterdam in 1586–1590 and 1672–1674 shows the age-specific patterns and fluctuations in the level of mortality among an urban bourgeoisie at the beginning and end of the seventeenth century. Expectation of life at birth was approximately 25 years during the earlier per…
The Impact of Multiple Births on Fertility
Multiple births strain mothers’ and families’ resources in ways that should highlight preferences for family size, birth spacing, and parity-dependent stopping behavior. Couples with surviving twins reach their target family size sooner than other couples and should be more likely to practice family limitation. Twins are also a greater burden on the mother's time and health, which could lead to postponing the next birth, even among couples who wa…
Generation to Generation
After two centuries of demographic change, societies of European origin face a new reality of aging populations and heightened competition for resources between young and old. Research on the history of the family adds important perspectives on our current problems. In northwestern Europe, transfers of resources to the young and old were constrained by an unusual marriage and household formation system. The transition to small families increased …
Compléter les histoires de vie par imputation des dates de sortie d'observation. Une méthode adaptée aux données historiques
Les biographies sont souvent construites à partir de sources administratives et d'autres documents qui témoignent d'événements particuliers comme une naissance, un décès, une visite chez le médecin, une demande de contrat d'assurance ou le recours à un service. Dans un système d'« enregistrement passif », les individus ne sont pas observés de façon continue, mais lorsqu'un événement se produit. Quand une personne quitte la zone couverte par le sy…
Casting Spells
An increasing number of demographic researchers have recently developed an interest in using the group of techniques often referred to as Event History Analysis (see for example Allison 1984). After several years of using these methods ourselves we have come to the conclusion that the event history approach requires data organized and conceptualized rather differently than that used in many other demographic or social scientific applications. Thi…
History and quantitative data
(1981). History and quantitative data: A review. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 145-148
Agricultural productivity, partible inheritance, and the demographic response to rural poverty
Estimating Mortality from Annuities, Insurance, and Other Life Contingent Contracts
author addresses three problems in converting data from life contingent contracts into mortality estimates. First [he discusses] how age period and cohort effects can be identified and the construction of age specific mortality rates for periods and cohorts. Second an indirect standardization procedure for estimating the overall level of mortality from a partial life table [is] proposed. Third bias due to the selection of healthy nominees in annu…
Plague and the Amsterdam annuitant
A great deal of information about mortality can be found in the records of life annuities which were sold by governments in early modern Europe. Analysis of life annuities sold in Amsterdam in 1586–1590 and 1672–1674 shows the age-specific patterns and fluctuations in the level of mortality among an urban bourgeoisie at the beginning and end of the seventeenth century. Expectation of life at birth was approximately 25 years during the earlier per…
Work and Income in the Family Economy
During the last twenty years the focus of research on the workingclass family has undergone an important shift. Most previous scholarship emphasized the physical and moral hardships of women and children in factories which had been so luridly detailed by contemporary reformers. More recent work does not belittle the hardships experienced in early industrialization, but rather emphasizes the positive and essential economic contributions of women a…
Report and Summary
Analysis of Reconstituted Families
The authors describe computer programs that deal with the statistical analysis of family reconstitution data. They have used a general statistical package Statistical Analysis System (SAS) which is widely available. It has been possible to produce all the standard tables used in the classic monographs in historical demography and to retain the flexibility and power of a general statistical package....The SAS programs presented here were developed…
Family and the Female Life Course. The Women of Verviers, Belgium, 1849-1880
The tension between women s workplace opportunity and family obligation is not exclusively a phenomenon of the 1980s, as George Alter makes abundantly clear in this study. His close investigation of women s lives in a nineteenth-century European industrial city advances our knowledge in several areas of social history, historical demography, and life course studies. It is the first monograph to apply event history analysis to the study of family …
The epidemiologic transition and morbidity
In essays about the theory of epidemiologic transition, Abdel Omran has argued that demographic change in the last century occurred in stages that can be characterized by their leading causes of death. The transition consists of a change in leading causes from infectious to degenerative and man-made diseases. In that version of the theory, the death rate is held to approximate the sickness rate. This essay identifies an epidemiologic transition i…
Frailty, Sickness, and Death
Insurance records from historical sources and recent health surveys suggest that movements in mortality and morbidity are inversely related. Data from nineteenth century England show increases in the prevalence of sickness at all adult ages at the same time that death rates were falling. This paper examines theoretical models which relate movements in mortality and morbidity. The heterogeneous ‘frailty’ model proposed by Vaupel, Manton, and Stall…
New Perspectives on European Marriage in the Nineteenth Century
In recent years, the research inspired by John Hajnal's hypothesis concerning European marriage has been followed by work on the balance between population and resources and on the prevalence of the nuclear family in Europe. These new directions have raised questions about the Hajnal hypothesis and a number of them are dealt with by the articles in the present collection
Working Class Debt in the Late Nineteenth Century United States
Children's wages played a central role in family economic strategies in the late nineteenth century. The family budgets collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1889-1890 show that life-cycle patterns of savings and debt varied by industry depending upon incomes from children. The consumption patterns of families whose expenditures exceeded their incomes do not show signs of economic distress, and most families whose annual budget was in de…
The Savings of Ordinary Americans
We explore the savings behavior of ordinary Americans through their accounts at the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, the oldest mutual savings bank in the United States. Our sample contains all 2,374 accounts opened in 1850. Savings accounts were generally brief affairs, but median balances mounted to about three-quarters of annual income in three years. Deposits and withdrawals were infrequent, but substantial. Only female servants, as a group,…
The European marriage pattern as solution and problem
The essay considers the effects of marriage patterns on the support of the elderly with empirical evidence from Verviers, a small industrial city in nineteenth-century Belgium. The (Northwest) European Marriage Pattern offered a solution for those elderly who had children, especially those with large families, because coresidence with children was the main source of support. The larger community experienced a problem...in the form of large number…
Studying Causes of Death in the Past
The authors provide an overview of articles in this issue of Historical Methods which is devoted to new approaches to the historical study of causes of death. Topics covered include cause-of-death registration in the past assessing long-term changes in causes of death and suggestions for future research directions. (ANNOTATION)
Reflections on the classification of causes of death
On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of Causes of Death’, with funding from the US National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The conference brought together historians of medicine and historically-oriented demographers and epidemiologists to discuss the origins of the recording of causes of death and the possible uses of these documents i…
L'event history analysis en démographie historique. Difficultés et perspectives
Depuis la mise au point de la reconstitution des familles, les questions et les méthodes de la démographie historique ont beaucoup évolué. Au cours de la dernière décennie, la constitution de banques de données individuelles et le projet de suivre les itinéraires de chacun ont conduit à utiliser et à mettre au point de nouveaux traitements statistiques. L'article présente les questions, les techniques, les résultats et les perspectives de lèvent …
Casting Spells
An increasing number of demographic researchers have recently developed an interest in using the group of techniques often referred to as Event History Analysis (see for example Allison 1984). After several years of using these methods ourselves we have come to the conclusion that the event history approach requires data organized and conceptualized rather differently than that used in many other demographic or social scientific applications. Thi…
Classifying the Dead
GEORGE C. ALTER, ANN G. CARMICHAEL; Classifying the Dead: Toward a History of the Registration of Causes of Death, Journal of the History of Medicine and A
Vieillir dans les ménages d'une ville industrielle
Although most migration takes place at young âges, mobility in old age is a significant life course transition. Population registers from Verviers, Belgium allow us to examine the timing and destination of migrants to an early center of the Industrial Révolution. In général, migrants at older âges were poorer than natives or earlier arrivais. Those who came in early old âge (55-75) tended to arrive as heads of families, but after âge 75 females a…
Mortalité et migration dans les villes industrielles au XIXe siècle
La collaboration entre l'équipe belge et l'équipe française permet ici de comparer des exemples de villes industrielles et de villes traditionnelles. On constate le net retard de la transition épidémiologique et sanitaire des premières par rapport aux secondes (et par rapport à la situation moyenne de chaque pays). Le retard est en particulier caractérisé par le maintien, voire l'aggravation, d'une très forte mortalité enfantine jusqu'au dixième …
The Family and Mortality
Les différences de mortalité entre les familles fournissent un indice de l'importance des comportements inobservés conditionnant à la santé. Par exemple, si la plus faible mortalité était due à des attitudes personnelles apprises au cours de l'enfance, elle devrait se manifester jusqu'aux âges élevés. Dans cet article sont utilisées des données provenant d'une commune belge, au xix e siècle, afin de préciser les différences de mortalité entre les…
Height, wealth and longevity in xixth century East Belgium
Les épidémiologistes et les démographes ont pendant longtemps suspecté les conditions de vie et de maladie au cours de l'enfance d'influencer la mortalité ultérieure, mais il a été difficile de faire la part entre les effets de ces conditions et les autres facteurs s'exerçant sur la santé. Les enfants élevés dans les familles pauvres connaissent plus fréquemment que les autres une situation économique très difficile au cours de leur âge adulte ma…
Stature in Transition
Eastern Belgium provides a range of examples of early industrialization. In the nineteenth century, well-established proto-industrial textile and iron production was replaced by mechanization in rapidly growing cities. In this article we examine the consequences of this transition on heights of young men in seven communities with contrasting histories. Men in this area were unusually short in the early nineteenth century, but the trend was strong…
Stature in Transition
Eastern Belgium provides a range of examples of early industrialization. In the nineteenth century, well-established proto-industrial textile and iron production was replaced by mechanization in rapidly growing cities. In this article we examine the consequences of this transition on heights of young men in seven communities with contrasting histories. Men in this area were unusually short in the early nineteenth century, but the trend was strong…
Sociology (24 obras) · Demography (20 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Population (18 obras) · Geography (17 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (17 obras) · Economics (15 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras) · History (12 obras) · Demography (11 obras)