Project leader
Funding source
Forte - Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare
Project Details
Start date: 01/01/2014
End date: 31/12/2016
Funding: 3030000 SEK
Description
In our project, we study patterns in family structure and kinship in Sweden over the last 250 years, and how these patterns have changed during this period. Our research is based on unique longitudinal individual registers, with a time length without comparison outside Sweden. The project generates fundamental demographic data on issues such as the number of live children and parents of individuals at different ages, number of extended-family members, and other issues related to family structure and kinship, both in contemporary societies and in the past. Our research produces completely new insights into these issues. We contribute to a better understanding of contemporary demographic challenges related to reconstituted families and family care of the elderly.
A precondition for our project is the novel linkage of different sources of data. In Sweden, as the first country in the world, it has recently become possible to link data from modern administrative registers with those from historical parish registers. Sweden has excellent historical as well as contemporary data, but digitized data has until recently been missing for the period 1900-1960. Lately, parish register data have been digitised for this period as well. For our research, we link data on previous inhabitants in Skellefteå in Northern Sweden, as derived from the demographic database at Umeå University (1700-1950), with data from nationwide contemporary population registers at Statistics Sweden (1960-2007). These new register linkages allow brand new research on kinship and family formation.
