Population and vital statistics
Population and vital statistics
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人口和人口动态统计
DOI：
10.1007/978-1-349-01088-2_2
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发表时间：
1975
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
B. R. Mitchell
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
B. R. Mitchell
人口数据的主要现代来源是官方人口普查和登记记录。在欧洲，对国家人口的最早定期统计可以追溯到这项工作所涉期间的开始。但在斯堪的纳维亚半岛以外(有些国家虽然不是所有意大利国家)，对出生、死亡和婚姻进行系统的监督和民事登记已经成为19世纪甚至20世纪的现象。因此，对不同国家的历史报道在范围上差别很大。不幸的是，也有充分的理由相信，它的准确性各不相同。人口普查几乎普遍的趋势是低估数字，尽管公布的结果有时也可能出于政治目的而被故意夸大。同样，有一部分重大事件也逃过了书记官长的网。但在大多数国家，随着官员变得更加老练，以及民众变得更加习惯于程序，对程序的目的不那么怀疑，这些倾向几乎肯定会随着时间的推移而下降。然而，近几十年来独居城镇居民人数的增加，以及来自较贫穷地区的大量移民的发展，可能在一些国家逆转了这一进程。直到最近，还没有办法知道低估的程度或其随时间的变化，所以在大多数情况下，除了猜测过去的误差幅度之外，不可能做更多的事情。总的来说，在一个系列的头两到三次人口普查之后，将所有定期普查的精确度都保持在5%以内似乎是安全的。2孤立的、零星的人口普查总体上可能不太可靠。在人口普查中获得的某些信息可能比其他信息更不准确。有关职业的数据存在特殊困难，这些问题将在下一节中讨论。但本节中显示年龄组数据的表格可能包含所有数据中误差最大的一些。除了意外错误外，这些信息特别容易被受访者故意篡改。当人口普查全部或部分，甚至仅根据普遍看法，与服兵役义务有关时，如果人口普查官员不是特别熟练，可能会严重低估处于危险中的男性年龄组。而且，在任何时候，虚荣心都可能对统计数据产生了一些影响。另一个错误的来源，特别是在文盲和政治动荡时期，是无知或不完整的知识。在许多人口普查中，特别是在巴尔干国家，就在两次世界大战之前，被统计的60岁、70岁、80岁等人，甚至65岁、75岁、85岁的人，远高于61岁、72岁、83岁或其他“非四舍五入”年龄的人。在没有出生证明或其他文学证据的情况下，似乎对一个人的确切年龄的了解往往只是到了生命的后期才变得大致。
The principal modern sources of population data are official censuses and registration records. In Europe, the earliest regular enumeration of national population dates from around the beginning of the period covered in this work. But outside Scandinavia (and some though by no means all the Italian states), systematic censustaking and civil registration of births, deaths, and marriages have been nineteenth-or even twentieth-century phenomena. Historical coverage of the different countries, therefore, varies widely in scope. There is also good reason to believe, unfortunately, that it varies in accuracy. The almost universal tendency of censuses is to underenumerate, though published results may also have been deliberately inflated on occasion for political purposes. A proportion of vital events similarly escapes the registrar's net. But in most countries these tendencies have almost certainly declined over time, as officials have become more sophisticated, and as the population became more accustomed to procedures and less suspicious of their purpose. However, the increase in the number of town-dwellers living alone in recent decades, and, still more, the development of considerable immigration from poorer lands, may have reversed this process in some countries. Until quite recently1 there was no means of knowing either the extent of understatement or its variation over time, so for the most part it is impossible to do more than guess at margins of error in the past. By and large, it seems safe to take all regular censuses after the first two or three in a series as accurate to within five per cent overal1. 2 Isolated, sporadic censuses are probably rather less reliable in general.Some kinds of information elicited in censuses are likely to be less accurate than others. Data about occupations present special difficulties, and these are considered in the next section. But the table in this section showing agegroup data probably contains some of the largest margins of error of all. In addition to accidental errors, this information is peculiarly liable to deliberate falsification by respondents. When censuses were taken wholly or partly, or even only in popular belief, in connection with military service obligations, the male age-groups at risk might be seriously understated if the census officials were not particularly skilled. And at all times, vanity may have had some influence on the statistics. A further source of error, especially amongst illiterate people and in times of political disturbance, has been ignorance or incomplete knowledge. In many censuses, in the Balkan countries especially, right up to the interwar period, the number of people enumerated in single years of age was far higher for the ages 60, 70, 80, etc., or even for 65, 75, 85, than for 61, 72, 83, or other'unrounded'ages. In the absence of birth certificates or other literary evidence, it seems that knowledge of one's exact age had often become only approximate by the later stages of life.