Abstract
The Demographic Data Base (DDB) at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University has since the 1970s been building longitudinal population databases and disseminating data for research. The databases were built to serve as national research infrastructures, useful for addressing an indefinite number of research questions within a broad range of scientific fields, and open to all academic researchers who wanted to use the data. A countless number of customised datasets have been prepared and distributed to researchers in Sweden and abroad and to date, the research has resulted in more than a thousand published scientific reports, books, and articles within a broad range of academic fields. While there has long been a clear predominance of research within the humanities and social sciences, it has always been used for research in other fields as well, for example medicine. In this article, we first give a brief presentation of the DDB and its history, characteristics, and development from the 1970s to the present. It includes an overview of the research based on the DDB databases, with a focus on the databases POPUM and POPLINK with individual-level data. A number of major traits of the research from 1973 to now have been outlined, showing the breadth of the research and highlighting some major contributions, with a focus on work that would have been very difficult to perform without data from the DDB.
Highlights
The Demographic Data Base (DDB) at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University has been committed since the 1970s to building longitudinal population databases and disseminating data for research
The DDB has become a valuable source for research, for both local scholars at Umeå University as well as external researchers, from other universities in Sweden and abroad
This has been a quite extensive overview of the history of the DDB and of the research based on DDB data
Summary
The Demographic Data Base (DDB) at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University has been committed since the 1970s to building longitudinal population databases and disseminating data for research. In contrast to many other similar ventures, already from the start the databases at the DDB were built to serve as research infrastructures, useful for addressing an indefinite number of research questions within a broad range of scientific fields, and open to all academic researchers who wanted to use the data. The research has resulted in more than a thousand published scientific reports, books, and articles within a broad range of academic fields, and has been used for almost 70 dissertations (DDB, 2016). The DDB owns and administers three main research databases: POPUM, with individual-level data from Swedish parishes covering the period 1680–1900; POPLINK, with similar data but over a longer time span, until around 1950; and TABVERK, with aggregate statistics from all Swedish parishes for the period 1749–1859. We have outlined a number of major traits of the research from 1973 to thereby showing the breadth of the research and highlighting some major contributions, with a focus on work that would have been very difficult to perform without data from the DDB
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