Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel* |
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Authors: | Auke Rijpma Johan Fourie |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of History, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands;2. Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa |
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Abstract: | AbstractIn 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. |
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Keywords: | Census machine learning micro-data record linkage panel data South Africa |
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