Cameron D. Campbell 康文林

Family, Social Mobility, and Inequality in China and in Comparative Perspective

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New paper recapping 40 years of ‘big data’ research on population, family and social history by James Lee, Cameron Campbell and collaborators

Posted on September 11, 2020February 11, 2022 by camecamp
James Lee and I in Daoyi in 1987

James Lee and I just published a paper that summarizes our work over the last few decades studying population, family and social history via construction and analysis of historical datasets from archival records. The paper has three parts: an introduction to the datasets we have constructed, a history of our work together and with others, and then a systematic summary of the results of all our studies. This paper is an invited contribution to a special issue of Historical Life Course Studies devoted to introductions to the major historical population databases. Papers on the Quebec BALSAC project and the Historical Sample of the Netherlands are already posted.

Here is the paper: https://doi.org/10.51964/hlcs9303

This is different to any of our other papers because it is both a career retrospective and a comprehensive summary of everything that James and I and our collaborators have done together over more than three decades that ties everything together and shows how each project led to the next. It starts from our early efforts on population that used household registers, and goes to right up to the present day, including our new projects on university students, civil officials, and educated professionals.

In front of the No. 1 Historical Archives in Beijing in 1987

The section on the history of our collaboration will hopefully be the most readable: it starts with James Lee’s visit to China in 1979 to look for records in historical archives that could be turned into databases, then I show up in 1987 at the end my sophomore year at Caltech. Later others joined to form what is now the Lee-Campbell Group. We also talk about our involvement in the Eurasia Project in Population and Family History. There are what I hope will be interesting anecdotes, reminisces, and reflections.

The introduction to our databases and summary of results, meanwhile, is the first time we have put almost everything we have done together in one place. We hope that it will be useful for those who may be familiar with specific pieces of our work to gain a better sense of the larger research agenda In into which these pieces fit.

This was a fun paper to write, especially the history section which includes some discussion of the roles that our times at Caltech, UCLA, Michigan and most recently HKUST played in advancing our research projects.

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