Evan Roberts

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Credentials

PhD

Bio

Evan Roberts is a demographic historian with a focus on changes in health and mortality from the nineteenth century to the present in Australasia and North America. His current research focuses on early-life experiences and later life socio-economic and health outcomes. He has extensive experience in creating longitudinal data, linking early-twentieth century records to modern epidemiological surveys and vital records.

Roberts received his BA(Hons) (History and Economics) and BSc (Mathematics and Statistics) degrees from Victoria University of Wellington, before completing an MA and PhD in History at the University of Minnesota. Roberts worked in health and social policy evaluation at the New Zealand Ministry of Health and the Health Services Research Centre, and taught at Victoria University of Wellington from 2007-11.

His research interests are in the demographic, social, and economic history of Australasia and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. His current research projects are about (1) health and living standards in New Zealand and the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present, and (2) married women's work and the family economy in the United States between the Civil War and World War II.

His research explores how the impact of early life influences on later life outcomes has changed over time. This focus on changes in the life course brings a conceptual unity to studies of weight and mortality in New Zealand soldiers, migration and later-life health in Iowa women, children in early-twentieth century Saint Paul, and married couples in Chicago, to name just a few of the data sources he has worked with. His work is characterized by a search for early-life data that can be linked to later life sources. The practical challenges of this work have taken me into work on record linkage and efficient ways to crowd-source or computer recognize old hand writing.

Roberts has published widely in demographic and economic history journals including Demography, Explorations in Economic History, Journal of Economic History, History of the Family, and Historical Methods.

Research Summary

My research interests are in the demographic, social, and economic history of Australasia and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on examining how the impact of early life influences on later life outcomes has changed over time. My current research projects are about (1) health and living standards in New Zealand and the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present, and (2) married women's work and the family economy in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. This focus on changes in the life course brings a conceptual unity to studies of weight and mortality in New Zealand soldiers, migration and later-life health in Iowa women, children in early-twentieth century Saint Paul, and married couples in Chicago, to name just a few of the data sources I have worked with. My work is characterized by a search for early-life data that can be linked to later life sources. The practical challenges of this work have taken me into work on record linkage and efficient ways to crowd-source or computer recognize old handwriting. I lead the Measuring the ANZACs project (http://www.measuringtheanzacs.org/) to crowd-source the transcription of all New Zealand's World War I personnel files.