Enhancing life courses: using GIS to construct ‘new’ aggregate and individual-level data on health and society in twentieth-century Britain

This chapter describes two major collaborations between the Great Britain Historical GIS and medical researchers, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council under their ‘Health Variations’ and ‘New Dynamics of Aging’ programmes. Required to be policy-relevant, they dealt with the relatively recent past: the lifetimes of today’s elderly, in practice running back to the 1921 census. Most British historical demographic research using GIS focuses on the period from c.1850 to 1911, when most data were reported by a relatively stable system of Registration Districts, so the next section describes the evolution of the quite different geography of local government districts created in 1894. The second section discusses alternative approaches taken to creating time series for consistent geographical areas. The final substantive section describes how individual-level information from the Office of National Statistics Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Health and Development, generally known as the 1946 Birth Cohort, were linked to area data and a GIS framework.