Causes, connections, and continuous measures: where we are going in family history

Historical family demography moves through its own life cycle. Early beginnings in cross-sectional regression analysis of samples grew into explicitly longitudinal approaches as family historians drew on life course concepts and analytical methods from contemporary social statistics. Realizing the potential of a full life course approach was long limited by the small numbers historians could reliably trace across time. In the mid-2020s, historical family demographers, particularly in North America and Europe, find themselves sometimes having better data for understanding life course changes than contemporaries studying live cohorts. The constant historians’ advantage remains: by studying the past we can often follow people to their deaths. To that advantage, family historians now add digitized data for complete national populations, which has enabled construction of large multi-wave panels in many countries, or the sources to construct panels at lower cost than previously. Beyond the benefits of studying more lives over longer periods, these new data sources allow historical family demographers to innovate in three key ways: causes, connections, and continuous measures. Larger panel samples allow us to infer causal effects by comparing the evolving lives of siblings and neighbors sharing common early environments, but with diverging later life experiences and outcomes. Family historians have a special advantage in contributing to important open debates in the social sciences about the influence of early life on adult outcomes. These approaches draw on the connections that large data let us make between people at different points in their life, and the ease of linking smaller data sources into registers and censuses. Finally, complete datasets on national populations allow us to compute creative new continuous measures of social context at the individual level.