Longitudinal Analysis of Age- and Gender-Specific Migration Patterns in England and Wales

Abstract

Many geographers have argued for the need to incorporate change over time into their analyses (see, for example, Haggett 1965; Hägerstrand 1970; Thrift 1977;Marsh et al. 1988); however, changes to administrative boundaries often mean that demographic statistics collected at two different dates cannot be directly compared. This has made it very difficult to study longitudinal change without resorting to undesirable levels of aggregation, typically to county level in Britain or state level in the United States. This article describes a technique that makes significant advances toward eliminating this problem: a researcher using this technique can compare statistics by standardizing all relevant data on a single set of administrative units. My article builds on the work of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project (Gregory and Southall 1998) and uses net migration as an example.The geographical information system (GIS) is not yet complete, so the article focuses on the methodological issues. These issues could be applied to a wide range of problems in historical geography. More broadly, it is hoped that the article will give some idea of the potential for using GIS to analyze spatially referenced data in the context of social science history.