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Fatal places? A re-analysis of child mortality from the 1911 census of England and Wales

Alice Reid, University of Cambridge
Eilidh Garrett, Cambridge University
Hannaliis Jaadla, University of Cambridge
Sarah Rafferty, University of Cambridge

In Fatal Years (1991), Preston and Haines offered a comprehensive analysis of individual level data on infant mortality from the 1900 US census. They also provided a comparative analysis of the English and Welsh census of 1911, concluding that social class was to the UK what race was to the US. However there was, at that time, no individual level data available for England and Wales, so they were constrained to use aggregate data, and this limited the influences they could explore and retarded comparison of different influences. Later, we were able to analyse the individual level data for a small selection of places, and found that the while there were strong class differences, these were the product of the sorting of social classes into different places. The type of place had a stronger effect on mortality than class when both were controlled. However our analysis was limited by the small selection of places in our dataset. Now the full-count individual data for the 1911 census of England and Wales are available, and this paper will not only investigate the whole country, but will use more sophisticated and appropriate methods than our early study, including multilevel and spatial techniques.

Keywords: Mortality, Census data, Multi-level modeling, Historical demography/methods

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 116. Inequalities, Health and Wellbeing