New Developments in Longitudinal Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database (LIFE-M) Project

Martha Bailey, University of California, Los Angeles
Dora L. Costa, University of California, Los Angeles
Peter Lin, Western Kentucky University
Mengying Zhang, University of Michigan

We present a plan to significantly enhance and expand the Longitudinal Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-dataset (LIFE-M), which integrates millions of birth, marriage, and death records with decennial censuses over four generations from the late 19th to the 20th century. Over the next five years, we plan to (1) expand LIFE-M’s geographic coverage by linking vital records for additional states, bringing the population covered to roughly 20% of the U.S. population in 1940; (2) add non-vital records, including (a) the Social Security Death Index and Numerical Identification Files, (b) the 1930 and 1950 Censuses, and (c) World War I draft and World War II enlistment records; (3) enhance LIFE-M’s health information by digitizing millions of causes of death for LIFE-M individuals; and (4) publicly disseminate the new data through Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), along with variable descriptions, documentations, user guides, and trained machine-learning models. Expanding and enhancing the LIFE-M infrastructure will facilitate path-breaking research on the role of early-life conditions on longevity, aging, causes of death, and life-course transitions for family networks across four generations. It will also allow research to understand heterogeneity in these relationships across geographic space and the role of moderating and mediating forces, such as rapid industrialization and urbanization, the expansion of public health, hospital infrastructure and policy, mass migration, and economic collapse.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 45. New Developments in Linked Data Infrastructure