AID analysis and migration history

Abstract

In September 1971, Sune Åkerman, Per Gunnar Cassel and Egil Johansson (a historian, a statistician and an educationist respectively) published a study on Swedish migration during the late nineteenth century, in which a recently-introduced statistical method known as Automatic Interaction Detector Analysis (AID) was employed to process the historical source-material. Though these three scholars came from different academic disciplines, they will be referred to in the present article as ‘the AID historians’. Since then, Åkerman and Johansson have continued along this pioneering road both in their own research and in guiding that of others. Johansson has published a comprehensive dissertation on literacy in one area of Sweden, which relies markedly upon AID analysis, and as supervisor he has recommended the method. A section of another dissertation published recently (1974) by Hans Norman, a member of Åkerman's research team, is devoted to explaining emigration from three Swedish Iän (counties) with the aid of AID analysis. Johansson, Åkerman and Norman gave an account of the method and an evaluation of its possibilities at the Sixth International Congress of Economic History in 1974. Finally, the first study mentioned above by Åkerman, Johansson and Cassel was translated and reprinted in the present journal ‘Background Variables of Population Mobility: An Attempt at Automatic Interaction Detector Analysis’ (SEHR Vol 22, 1974, pp. 32-60), giving a full account in English of the authors' application of AID analysis to historical research. Accordingly it is to this article that most of our interest will be directed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bo Gullberg

Bo Gullberg, born 1944. Ph. cand. (Lund) 1967, research assistent of Statistics, Lund, 1973.

Birgitta Oden

Birgitta Odén, born 1921. Ph. D. (Lund) 1955, Professor of History, University of Lund 1965.