The Rise and Fall of the Industrial City: The Landskrona Population Study
The aim of this research program is to analyze long-term demographic processes connected to industrialization, modern economic growth and the profound societal transformation of the 20th century. These changes have completely altered living conditions across the developed world, not only in terms of nutrition, consumption and overall quality of life, but also in loosening many of the demographic constraints that dominated people's lives for so long. The broad outline of these processes is well known through research at the macro level but we still know very little about the micro-level foundations, which is of great value to fully understand and explain the processes. Within the Landskrona Population Study (LPS) we will study these vital economic and demographic changes in Sweden through the lens of an industrial city which has experienced this transformation. The LPS is based on a unique data infrastructure, the Scanian Demographic Database, containing economic and demographic longitudinal data at the individual level for the full 20th century (ca 350,000 individuals). It focuses on the four fundamental and interrelated economic-demographic processes: (1) Inequality in health and mortality, (2) Changing family patterns and gender relations, (3) Social and economic mobility, and (4) Immigration and integration.
Final report
The aim of this research program was to analyze long-term demographic processes connected to industrialization, modern economic growth, and the profound societal transformation of the 20th century. These changes have completely altered living conditions across the developed world, not only in terms of nutrition, consumption, and overall quality of life, but also in loosening many of the demographic constraints that dominated human lives for so long. The broad outline of these processes has been well known through research at the macro level but we lacked knowledge about the micro-level foundations, which is of great value to fully understand and explain the processes. Within the Landskrona Population Study (LPS) we have studied these vital economic and demographic changes in Sweden through the lens of an industrial city which has experienced this transformation. It focused on four fundamental and interrelated economic-demographic processes: (1) Inequality in health and mortality, (2) Changing family patterns and gender relations, (3) Social and economic mobility, and (4) Immigration and integration. The research program was based at the Centre for Economic Demography at the Lund School of Economics and Management, but also included extensive collaboration with outside researchers and infrastructures.
The program included considerable infrastructure development. Most of the research was based on a unique data infrastructure – the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database – containing economic and demographic longitudinal data at the individual level for the full 20th century (ca 350,000 individuals). From its inception as a purely historical database, it is now extended to present times, and a major extension of the database has taken place within the program. It covers all individuals born in or migrated to the city of Landskrona and five rural parishes in western Scania from 1813 to 1968. All those surviving until 1968 have been linked with national registers from Statistics Sweden, Socialstyrelsen, and Krigsarkivet, providing data from 1968 to 2015. This allowed us to track the study population as well as their descendants, regardless of where they lived in Sweden.
Within the research program we added data from population registers, vital event registers and income- and taxation registers for Landskrona for the period 1905-1946, completing the already existing database. As a result, the database now contains continuous longitudinal information for the populations of the five parishes from 1813-1968 and for Landskrona from 1905-1968. The work extending the database has been carried out by a group of data-entry assistants and a data manager, who have mainly worked at the Regional Archives in Lund (a division under the National Archives). In addition to data registration, we have invested considerable resources in program development to structure and harmonize the data as well as to produce high-quality analytical datasets which our research has been based on, but which has also been shared with the international community through our international collaboration.
The database is unique in several respects. It covers a longer time period than comparable databases and has a wealth of information on a large number of variables on individual and family level. It combines various demographic and socioeconomic records, including causes of death, place of birth and geographic data on the place of residence within a parish, family context, occupation, and income.
The long period covered and the linkages between individuals and families over time has allowed research from a multigenerational perspective (more than two generations). The depth of the database in terms of variable coverage is remarkable, including not only demographic information and causes of death but also individual-level economic data. The latter includes annual income and detailed and continuous information on occupation, coded and classified by international standards (HISCO and HISCLASS). Together with individual-level data on health at different points in life and community-level information on institutions, economic conditions, and disease, this has enabled detailed studies of socioeconomic stratification and demographic processes over the long haul.
Since there was data available already when the program started research began immediately. At first researchers already present at the Centre for Economic Demography were recruited to the program and started on various sub-projects. As the program went along, we also made external recruitments of post docs as well as PhD students funded by other means but working together with the researchers in the program.
Our research has been published in the leading journals of general science, demography, and economic history and a volume summarizing our research from the program is forthcoming at Oxford University Press. We have made significant contributions to research on socioeconomic differences in health and mortality, social stratification and mobility, neighborhood effects, life-course research, and family and fertility. Important results from the program include a reassessment of the emergence of the health gradient, the importance of three-generation processes in social mobility, the importance of the childhood neighborhood socioeconomic composition for education, childbearing, and health in later life, and the causes of the divorce transition during the 20th century.
At a more general level, our findings clearly show how individuals and families were affected by the great societal transformation that took place during the 20th century, and which was rooted in the industrialization of the 19th century. At first, the emergence of industrial society created completely new conditions for people in terms of career, living standards, and well-being. The first six decades of the 20th century saw massive improvements while the decades after 1970 saw economic crisis and deindustrialization but, towards the end of the century, also renewed growth and transformation and a full transition into the post-industrial economy of the third industrial (digital) revolution. This long-term development was also connected to considerable inequality between individuals. Our research has tried to analyze these societal changes and their implications for individuals and their family, work, residence, and health. Landskrona has been our lab, but we are convinced that our findings have general validity far outside the study area.
At the end of the program we are still in the middle of much of the research. A number of new questions have arisen as a result of our research. One example is the research on the neighborhood effects that we started in the program but where much more remains to study. It concerns how neighborhoods are formed, how the physical neighborhood interacts with the social neighborhood, and how neighborhoods affect people throughout the life course, from childhood to old age. Another example is health inequalities, where we made important contributions but where much research remain before we have a full understanding of the causes behind the reversed mortality differentials in the early 20th century and why socioeconomic differences in health emerged and widened during the period when living standards improved tremendously and the modern welfare state developed. A third example of new questions emerging concerns the impact of policy interventions on individual behavior relating to family and health.
Our research findings have mainly been disseminated through the regular scientific channels of conferences and publications in peer-reviewed journals. However, we have also presented the program and its findings to people outside the scientific community. We made a contribution to RJ’s yearbook in 2000 (“Staden”) and were also featured in an UR television program organized by RJ. Finally, we have interacted with the local community in Landskrona, presenting the program and its findings. We have also participated in various activities connected to data infrastructures and register data, both in Sweden and abroad. Data from the database is freely available to outside researchers, sometimes with some legal restrictions (e.g. GDPR).
Throughout the program we have collaborated extensively with other researchers and research infrastructures. Apart from research collaborations that are visible in joint publications, we have been active participants in two larger collaborations. One is an international collaboration to develop a new harmonized data structure across several international historical databases (IDS), including code to produce datasets for comparative statistical analysis. The other major collaboration is the national research infrastructure Swedpop, with the aim to harmonize and disseminate historical Swedish population data. Swedpop is funded by VR and partner institutions (National Archives, Stockholm City Archives, and the universities of Göteborg, Lund and Umeå). Within this collaboration we have completely revised the coding of occupations, geographical place names, and causes of death as well as implemented IDS in all databases. Swedpop also offers a portal for downloading data, and all data are open to access for researchers at no costs.
The program included considerable infrastructure development. Most of the research was based on a unique data infrastructure – the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database – containing economic and demographic longitudinal data at the individual level for the full 20th century (ca 350,000 individuals). From its inception as a purely historical database, it is now extended to present times, and a major extension of the database has taken place within the program. It covers all individuals born in or migrated to the city of Landskrona and five rural parishes in western Scania from 1813 to 1968. All those surviving until 1968 have been linked with national registers from Statistics Sweden, Socialstyrelsen, and Krigsarkivet, providing data from 1968 to 2015. This allowed us to track the study population as well as their descendants, regardless of where they lived in Sweden.
Within the research program we added data from population registers, vital event registers and income- and taxation registers for Landskrona for the period 1905-1946, completing the already existing database. As a result, the database now contains continuous longitudinal information for the populations of the five parishes from 1813-1968 and for Landskrona from 1905-1968. The work extending the database has been carried out by a group of data-entry assistants and a data manager, who have mainly worked at the Regional Archives in Lund (a division under the National Archives). In addition to data registration, we have invested considerable resources in program development to structure and harmonize the data as well as to produce high-quality analytical datasets which our research has been based on, but which has also been shared with the international community through our international collaboration.
The database is unique in several respects. It covers a longer time period than comparable databases and has a wealth of information on a large number of variables on individual and family level. It combines various demographic and socioeconomic records, including causes of death, place of birth and geographic data on the place of residence within a parish, family context, occupation, and income.
The long period covered and the linkages between individuals and families over time has allowed research from a multigenerational perspective (more than two generations). The depth of the database in terms of variable coverage is remarkable, including not only demographic information and causes of death but also individual-level economic data. The latter includes annual income and detailed and continuous information on occupation, coded and classified by international standards (HISCO and HISCLASS). Together with individual-level data on health at different points in life and community-level information on institutions, economic conditions, and disease, this has enabled detailed studies of socioeconomic stratification and demographic processes over the long haul.
Since there was data available already when the program started research began immediately. At first researchers already present at the Centre for Economic Demography were recruited to the program and started on various sub-projects. As the program went along, we also made external recruitments of post docs as well as PhD students funded by other means but working together with the researchers in the program.
Our research has been published in the leading journals of general science, demography, and economic history and a volume summarizing our research from the program is forthcoming at Oxford University Press. We have made significant contributions to research on socioeconomic differences in health and mortality, social stratification and mobility, neighborhood effects, life-course research, and family and fertility. Important results from the program include a reassessment of the emergence of the health gradient, the importance of three-generation processes in social mobility, the importance of the childhood neighborhood socioeconomic composition for education, childbearing, and health in later life, and the causes of the divorce transition during the 20th century.
At a more general level, our findings clearly show how individuals and families were affected by the great societal transformation that took place during the 20th century, and which was rooted in the industrialization of the 19th century. At first, the emergence of industrial society created completely new conditions for people in terms of career, living standards, and well-being. The first six decades of the 20th century saw massive improvements while the decades after 1970 saw economic crisis and deindustrialization but, towards the end of the century, also renewed growth and transformation and a full transition into the post-industrial economy of the third industrial (digital) revolution. This long-term development was also connected to considerable inequality between individuals. Our research has tried to analyze these societal changes and their implications for individuals and their family, work, residence, and health. Landskrona has been our lab, but we are convinced that our findings have general validity far outside the study area.
At the end of the program we are still in the middle of much of the research. A number of new questions have arisen as a result of our research. One example is the research on the neighborhood effects that we started in the program but where much more remains to study. It concerns how neighborhoods are formed, how the physical neighborhood interacts with the social neighborhood, and how neighborhoods affect people throughout the life course, from childhood to old age. Another example is health inequalities, where we made important contributions but where much research remain before we have a full understanding of the causes behind the reversed mortality differentials in the early 20th century and why socioeconomic differences in health emerged and widened during the period when living standards improved tremendously and the modern welfare state developed. A third example of new questions emerging concerns the impact of policy interventions on individual behavior relating to family and health.
Our research findings have mainly been disseminated through the regular scientific channels of conferences and publications in peer-reviewed journals. However, we have also presented the program and its findings to people outside the scientific community. We made a contribution to RJ’s yearbook in 2000 (“Staden”) and were also featured in an UR television program organized by RJ. Finally, we have interacted with the local community in Landskrona, presenting the program and its findings. We have also participated in various activities connected to data infrastructures and register data, both in Sweden and abroad. Data from the database is freely available to outside researchers, sometimes with some legal restrictions (e.g. GDPR).
Throughout the program we have collaborated extensively with other researchers and research infrastructures. Apart from research collaborations that are visible in joint publications, we have been active participants in two larger collaborations. One is an international collaboration to develop a new harmonized data structure across several international historical databases (IDS), including code to produce datasets for comparative statistical analysis. The other major collaboration is the national research infrastructure Swedpop, with the aim to harmonize and disseminate historical Swedish population data. Swedpop is funded by VR and partner institutions (National Archives, Stockholm City Archives, and the universities of Göteborg, Lund and Umeå). Within this collaboration we have completely revised the coding of occupations, geographical place names, and causes of death as well as implemented IDS in all databases. Swedpop also offers a portal for downloading data, and all data are open to access for researchers at no costs.