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XAbout Steven’s Work
Steven Ruggles is a historical demographer building the most extensive database of population statistics in the world. The challenges Ruggles encountered in his research on changing family structures led him to create the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) in 1993. At IPUMS, Ruggles leads the collection, harmonization, and dissemination of a wealth of demographic data useful for studies of social change.
Ruggles’s scholarship on changes in family composition and living arrangements in the United States has analyzed the decline of multigenerational households and the rise of single parenthood and divorce. To investigate these and other changing characteristics of the population over decades and centuries, Ruggles required massive quantities of individual and household-level census data from manuscript collections dating back to the mid-19th century. Prior research with historical census data used inconsistent sampling techniques and focused on populations relevant only to specific research questions. Without uniform coding schemes and consistent documentation methods, these incomplete samples could not be used to make comparisons of data across vast time scales and different population subgroups. In response, Ruggles launched IPUMS to provide researchers with free and easy access to harmonized data sets. IPUMS includes data from United States decennial censuses from 1790 to 2010, in addition to other national survey archives. IPUMS records contain valuable information about social indicators such as occupation, housing, fertility, mortality, and migration. They are longitudinally linked across census years, allowing researchers to analyze trends over time. Ruggles has expanded the scope of his original vision by developing International IPUMS, which integrates census records from over 100 different countries and allows for comparative, transcontinental studies.
The highly versatile research infrastructure of IPUMS has set new standards for quantitative research in history and the social sciences. Scholars have used IPUMS data sets to explore the population dynamics contributing to COVID-19 vulnerability, how residential segregation interacts with employment, and the relationship between climate events and migration, among countless other topics. As he works to preserve the utility and accuracy of public use microdata, Ruggles is expanding the range of questions researchers can ask and answer about long-term demographic change.
Biography
Steven Ruggles received a BA (1978) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MA (1982) and PhD (1984) from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1985, he became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, where he currently serves as Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Regents Professor of History and Population Studies. He is also the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation and director of the IPUMS Center for Data Integration. Prior to these roles, he served as director of the Minnesota Population Center (2000–2016). Ruggles is the author of the book Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America (1987). His numerous articles have been published in such journals as American Historical Review, Journal of American History, American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Demography, among other publications.
Published on October 12, 2022
