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Following the competition within the framework of the EEA Financial Mechanism 2009-2014, The Romanian-EEA Research Programme - "Research within priority sectors" (http://uefiscdi.gov.ro/articole/3458/EEA-Financial- Mechanism-2009-2014.html), the Centre for Population Studies was awarded a grant for a highly original, innovative, 34 months project, Historical Population Database of Transylvania 1850-1910, in partnership with the Norwegian Historical Data Centre - University of Tromsø.
The project topic and its practical relevance
The new scientific requirements of the past couple of decades have imposed a change of perspective in the study of populations, shifting interest from the study of demographic regimes, of data aggregated strictly for longitudinal analysis, to research on the life course of people, based on micro-social level data. Life course refers to the route followed by individuals throughout their existence, to the events through which they pass: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, changes of occupation, migration. Demographic historians are showing an increased interest in this approach, focusing specifically on research methods based on micro-level data. Family reconstitution used to be considered the main traditional analytical tool for this purpose, but this stage has been overcome, and analytical tools have been developed so as to benefit from the entire wealth of information on the lives of individuals that is available to historians, marking the transition, in other words, to event history analysis. This entails, however, new requirements and demands as regards the manner of organizing the available data.
Historians have been creating such databases for nearly half a century, based on data available in archives (parish records, tax records, censuses and population registers). The development of technology has led to expanding the geographical areas of coverage for these datasets, as well as of the analytical power of these individual-level data. This has led to launching initiatives of creating infrastructures for population longitudinal data at a broader regional or national level, targeted at the scientific environment and designed to offer researchers access to secondary data about the life course of individuals throughout the 19th- 20th centuries, suitable for event history analysis. Such data are essential for understanding how economic, social and cultural changes have influenced the lives of ordinary people and how these people, in turn, have survived and experienced their life course.
Even if the merit of longitudinal data has been...