datasets (version 3.2.1)

swiss: Swiss Fertility and Socioeconomic Indicators (1888) Data

Description

Standardized fertility measure and socio-economic indicators for each of 47 French-speaking provinces of Switzerland at about 1888.

Usage

swiss

Format

A data frame with 47 observations on 6 variables, each of which is in percent, i.e., in $[0, 100]$.

[,1]	Fertility
$Ig$, ‘common standardized fertility measure’	[,2]
Agriculture	% of males involved in agriculture as occupation
[,3]	Examination
% draftees receiving highest mark on army examination	[,4]
Education	% education beyond primary school for draftees.
[,5]	Catholic
% ‘catholic’ (as opposed to ‘protestant’).	[,1]

All variables but ‘Fertility’ give proportions of the population.

Source

Project “16P5”, pages 549--551 in Mosteller, F. and Tukey, J. W. (1977) Data Analysis and Regression: A Second Course in Statistics. Addison-Wesley, Reading Mass. indicating their source as “Data used by permission of Franice van de Walle. Office of Population Research, Princeton University, 1976. Unpublished data assembled under NICHD contract number No 1-HD-O-2077.”

Details

(paraphrasing Mosteller and Tukey):

Switzerland, in 1888, was entering a period known as the demographic transition; i.e., its fertility was beginning to fall from the high level typical of underdeveloped countries.

The data collected are for 47 French-speaking “provinces” at about 1888.

Here, all variables are scaled to $[0, 100]$, where in the original, all but "Catholic" were scaled to $[0, 1]$.

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

Examples

require(stats); require(graphics)
pairs(swiss, panel = panel.smooth, main = "swiss data",
      col = 3 + (swiss$Catholic > 50))
summary(lm(Fertility ~ . , data = swiss))