Timeframe
2017-2020
COMPASS staff
Barry Milne
Eileen Li
Irene Wu
Martin von Randow
Collaborators
University of Auckland
Andrew Sporle
University of Otago Wellington
Sheree Gibb
Andrea Teng
University of Otago
Gabrielle Davie
Description
This project aims to investigate the extent to which intergenerational links are preserved in StatsNZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI). Intergenerational links are important to assess such things as transfer of wealth, socioeconomic mobility, and familial influences on health and wellbeing, both genetic and environmental.
Less investigated are multigenerational effects (spanning two or more generations). Our investigations have a particular interest in multigenerational links to open up possibilities for research on:
- Assessing the multigenerational effect of socioeconomic status on health and other outcomes for those living today, e.g. does socioeconomic influence span two generations and more?;
- Documenting intergenerational residential mobility, e.g. via geographical similarity between births from succeeding generations; and
- Assessing whether the biological effect of parental age on, e.g. psychiatric disorders, extends across generations.
The data sets in the IDI have been linked at the person-level for the whole New Zealand population, and cover different timeframes. Specifically, the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) data include birth information dating back to the 1840s, with unique IDs for the child and both their parents, where they exist. We focus on the DIA dataset as it is the only one in the IDI with potential links prior to 1990 that covers most of the population (Ministry of Social Development (MSD) records begin in 1990 and census records are only available from 2013 onwards).
Making use of these DIA intergenerational links, we seek to answer:
- How many generations can be determined?; and
- What is the total number at each generation?