The suitability of the data for supporting future research will be evaluated in two ways. First using internal tests; estimates of demographic measures will be prepared using different subsets (critically between the archival sources and the results of the two village censuses undertaken by myself). Such comparisons will establish the extent to which a model of the population derived from the archival data approaches one based on the census data, and which parts of the model are more or less robust.
Secondly, some new pilot data will be collected in the course of a separate research project, funded by The British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation and the University of Kent Social Science Faculty Research Board in July 1997. While in the field a small set of well-understood health-related data will be collected with the express aim of using it to test the main data being processed in this project.
The basic schedule will ask respondents who they first go to for advice in response to illness (their own or a family member, or neighbours). The results will be sensitive, among other factors, to the age of the respondents and whether they were born in the village. The results will reveal connections between density of kinship network and responses to illness. Existing ethnographic data already allows the basic patterns of response to be predicted with respect to population structure. The model and the census data-based accounts of population structure can then be evaluated by the extent to which they predict the distribution of the independently-collected pilot data.
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