Abstract

 
 
 The paper presents the application of principal component analysis and cluster analysis to historical individual level census data in order to explore social and economic variations and patterns in household structure across mid-Victorian England and Wales. Principal component analysis is used in order to identify and eliminate unimportant attributes within the data and the aggregation of the remaining attributes. By combining Kaiser’s rule and the Broken-stick model, four principal components are selected for subsequent data modelling. Cluster analysis is used in order to identify associations and structure within the data. A hierarchy of cluster structures is constructed with two, three, four and five clusters in 21-dimensional data space. The main differences between clusters are described in this paper.
 
 
Highlights
The opportunities to explore household and family patterns in new ways as a result of the emergence of new data resources providing large amounts of individual level historical microdata, sometimes covering entire countries, has been commented upon by Steven Ruggles (2012)
One approach advocated by Ruggles is to undertake analyses of spatial variation, using the greater and finer geographical coverage of these new data resources to illustrate complexities and differences that single place studies cannot
There have been relatively few studies of geographical variations in historical household structure in England and Wales. Those that have been attempted have been relatively inconclusive due to a basic lack of detailed data in order to fully investigate the subject, mainly because they have had to resort to the use of aggregated census data resulting in a lack of spatial granularity and detail, or partial sources for pre-census periods (Wall 1977; Schürer 1992)
Summary
The opportunities to explore household and family patterns in new ways as a result of the emergence of new data resources providing large amounts of individual level historical microdata, sometimes covering entire countries, has been commented upon by Steven Ruggles (2012). As one strand of a larger multi-national JISC-funded project, this paper does exactly that It explores spatial variations and patterns in household structure across mid-Victorian England and Wales in terms of socio-economic indicators, by applying multi-dimensional analysis techniques to historical geo-referenced census data. Those that have been attempted have been relatively inconclusive due to a basic lack of detailed data in order to fully investigate the subject, mainly because they have had to resort to the use of aggregated census data resulting in a lack of spatial granularity and detail, or partial sources for pre-census periods (Wall 1977; Schürer 1992). This transformation is defined in such a way that the first principal component has the largest possible variance and each subsequent component, respectively, has the highest variance possible under the constraint that it be orthogonal to the preceding components
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