Household Counts: Canadian Households and Families in 1901.

Elaine G. Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

The 14 chapters of this book are all based on data that have become available through the Canadian Families Project, a multidisciplinary collaborative undertaking that is part of a larger international project to construct other national censuses. The database for all the articles consists of a 5 percent microdata random sample of dwellings of 5,371,315 persons who were interviewed for the 1901 census. Such a database needs to be evaluated within the context of the data-gathering procedures of the time but, with these provisos, and in conjunction with other census data, it does allow for specification of trends in time, geographically, and across different social characteristics. Unfortunately, some of the technical difficulties encountered in the book were due to printing problems that omitted the first page of a chapter by Lepp in which, ironically, she discusses shortcomings in the reporting of divorce due to data collection methods of the census.

Some of the chapters contribute largely descriptive statistics on such demographic areas as fertility (Gossage & Gauvreau), geographic distribution (McCann, Buck & Heggen), children living with one parent (Bradbury), earnings and occupations (Sager), and lack of religious beliefs (Marks). The chapter on the young-old aged men (Dillon) explores changes prior to 1901 to data from Canada and the U.S. in 1870. The first chapter on household and family structure provides comparative data for 1901 and 1991 (Burke). The chapter by Gadfield documents, through political and journalistic sources, the extent to which French and English language identification was politicized between 1871 and 1901. Other chapters are based on more data manipulation, use of inferential statistics in some cases, and testing of hypotheses as in the chapter by Darroch comparing the household forms of never married individuals living away from home in 1871 and 1901. The analyses in the various chapters of this book show differences among provinces and time periods and, in so doing, help to specify the course of social changes that provide a more accurate picture of families and households in the past. Together, they give a good sense for the richness of the data set.