(Re)constructing the social stratification of a city in Holland, 18th and 19th century.
In my poster presentation I will point out the method which I used in obtaining a social stratification for Leiden, a relatively large city in Holland the 18th and 19th century. It is based on a combination of occupational data and the ratable value of houses.
Available were local census data from 1748, 1815 and 1849 of the city of Leiden which have been digitized on the individual level, i.e. the head of the household. Added to these census data were data from various tax registers on the value and the ownership of the house. These tax data are from the property tax register (verpondingsregister) and, for the nineteenth century, the cadastral registers.
The method used was that each separate occupation (occupational title) was assigned an average ratable value. After that social stratification groups were constructed on the basis of the Z-scores of these average values.
During the presentation I will go into the advantages and the problems connected with the construction of a social stratification constructed in this way. This includes questions like how to handle missing values and how large is the variation within one occupation to justify the use of averages.
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