The North Atlantic Population Project: Progress and Prospects

Abstract

The North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) is a massive database of historical census microdata from European and North American countries. The backbone of the project is the unique collection of completely digitized censuses providing information on the entire enumerated populations of each country. In addition, for some countries, the NAPP includes sample data from surrounding census years. In this article, the authors provide a brief history of the project, describe their progress to data and plans for the future, and discuss some potential implications of this unique data resource for social and economic research.

Age heaping patterns in Mosaic data

“…The major stimulus for Mosaic was a deficiency of existing comparative family history data, which-it was felt-should be overcome were the most pertinent research questions of historical family demography to be systematically answered Szo»tysek 2016). While IPUMS and NAPP projects brought about the unprecedented expansion of census microdata, their coverage remains either confined to the populations of the North Atlantic region or embraces mainly the late 19 th and the twentieth centuries (Ruggles et al 2011). Such a situation poses certain challenges to recovering and understanding the population and family history of continental Europe during the demographic ancien r egime and early phases of the demographic transition.…”

Social class and net fertility before, during, and after the demographic transition: A micro-level analysis of Sweden 1880-1970

“…Data for the first three censuses were digitized by the Swedish National Archives, and are published by the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP, see Ruggles et al 2011;Sobek et al 2011), which has adopted the same format as the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Here we have used the original data coded by the Swedish National Archives within the project SweCens (funded by the Swedish Research Council).…”

Importance of the Geocoding Level for Historical Demographic Analyses: A Case Study of Rural Parishes in Sweden, 1850–1914

“…The North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) (Ruggles et al 2011) is a machine-readable database containing complete census information for several Northern Atlantic countries Importance of the Geocoding Level for Historical… 39 (e.g., Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, the United States of America and Iceland) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This database contains individual-and household-level data that are available at several levels of aggregation (e.g., state, county, municipality, district, sub-district, province, parish and town).…”