Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel

Auke Rijpma, Jeanne Cilliers and Johan Fourie

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2020, vol. 53, issue 2, 112-129

Abstract: In this article, we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787–1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84% of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.

Date: 2020
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Working Paper: Record Linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel (2018)
Working Paper: Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:vhimxx:v:53:y:2020:i:2:p:112-129

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DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2018.1517030

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