Abstract
The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) at the Centre for Economic Demography (CED), Lund University was built to answer questions derived from previous research using macro data from 1749 onwards. It includes longitudinal micro data for a regional sample of rural, semi-urban, and urban parishes in southern Sweden from 1646 to 1968 for approximately 175,000 individuals. In addition to the data on births, deaths, marriages, and occupations, it includes data on migration, household size, landholdings, taxation, and heights from the 1800s onwards and on income from 1865 onwards. After being linked from 1968 to 2015 to a range of national registers with detailed demographic and socioeconomic information, it includes 825,000 individuals. The richness and wide range of micro data have allowed researchers to follow individuals throughout their lives and across generations, covering extensive periods, and to make comparisons with results from macro data. This research has partly confirmed the established view on long-term changes in living standards and demographics in Sweden but has also brought into question some previously held truths.
Highlights
The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) was initially compiled to answer the questions that stemmed from previous research using tabular data from 1749, the year when population censuses started in Sweden, and onwards
From 1968 to 2015, SEDD has been linked to a range of national registers with detailed demographic and socioeconomic information on all individuals who have ever lived in the area and their partners, children and grandchildren
We summarise the research on how conditions in early life influenced health and wellbeing later in life, the delayed effects of conditions in early life
Summary
The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) was initially compiled to answer the questions that stemmed from previous research using tabular data from 1749, the year when population censuses started in Sweden, and onwards. More knowledge is needed about how different social and economic groups were affected by this transformation For this reason, Tommy Bengtsson and Rolf Ohlsson, in 1983, started a collaboration with the Regional Archives in Lund with the aim of developing a database linking births, deaths, and marriages from church books with information on occupations for a sample of nine parishes and a town in western Scania, which later became the SEDD. The demographic development in this area — including the changes in total population, life expectancy, and family size — follows the same time trends as the entire country (Bengtsson & Dribe, 1997; Lazuka, 2017; Quaranta, 2013). We start each section by giving a brief overview of the context and previous research at the national and regional levels to compare with the findings using the SEDD microdata where they overlap
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