Geissler: Geissler's Data on the Human Sex Ratio

Description

Geissler (1889) published data on the distributions of boys and girls in families in Saxony, collected for the period 1876-1885. The Geissler data tabulates the family composition of 991,958 families by the number of boys and girls listed in the table supplied by Edwards (1958, Table 1).

Arguments

Format

A data frame with 90 observations on the following 4 variables. The rows represent the non-NA entries in Edwards' table.

boys: number of boys in the family, 0:12
girls: number of girls in the family, 0:12
size: family size: boys+girls
Freq: number of families with this sex composition

Details

The data on family composition was available because, on the birth of a child, the parents had to state the sex of all their children on the birth certificate. These family records are not necessarily independent, because a given family may have had several children during this 10 year period, included as multiple records.

References

Friendly, M. and Meyer, D. (2016). Discrete Data Analysis with R: Visualization and Modeling Techniques for Categorical and Count Data. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC. http://ddar.datavis.ca.

Geissler, A. (1889). Beitrage zur Frage des Geschlechts verhaltnisses der Geborenen Z. K. Sachsischen Statistischen Bureaus, 35, n.p.

Lindsey, J. K. & Altham, P. M. E. (1998). Analysis of the human sex ratio by using overdispersion models. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics), 47, 149-157.

Examples

Run this code


data(Geissler)
str(Geissler)

# reproduce Saxony data, families of size 12
Saxony12 <- subset(Geissler, size==12, select=c(boys, Freq))
rownames(Saxony12)<-NULL

# make a 1-way table
xtabs(Freq~boys, Saxony12)

# extract data for other family sizes
Saxony11 <- subset(Geissler, size==11, select=c(boys, Freq))
rownames(Saxony11)<-NULL

Saxony10 <- subset(Geissler, size==10, select=c(boys, Freq))
rownames(Saxony10)<-NULL