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Franz Boas’s Immigrant Study

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Clarence Gravlee, University of Florida

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
boas_family.sav	application/x-spss-sav	1.6 MB	09/27/2019 12:03:PM
boas_family.txt	text/plain	1.2 MB	09/27/2019 02:39:PM
boas_master.sav	application/x-spss-sav	1.5 MB	09/27/2019 12:04:PM
boas_master.txt	text/plain	969.1 KB	09/27/2019 12:04:PM
cdbk_boasfamily.pdf	application/pdf	140.7 KB	09/27/2019 12:04:PM
cdbk_boasmaster.pdf	application/pdf	105 KB	09/27/2019 12:03:PM

Project Citation:

Gravlee, Clarence. Franz Boas's Immigrant Study. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-09-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/E112086V1

Project Description

Summary: In 1910, Franz Boas published the first results from his classic study, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. This landmark work became controversial almost immediately, as it challenged many prevailing ideas about human biology and race. The most striking finding at the time was that head shape—long thought to be a fixed, purely hereditary marker of race—was in fact sensitive to changes in environment within a single generation.

Boas’s most impressive response to the controversy was his decision in 1928 to publish 504 pages of raw, handwritten data from the immigrant study as Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man (New York: Columbia University Press). He explained: "It seemed necessary to make the data accessible, because a great many questions relating to heredity and environmental influences may be treated by means of this material." In the same spirit, here we provide the machine-readable data set that is the basis of our published reanalysis of Boas’s data set.

The data are provided in two structures:

Files labeled "master" are formatted to match Boas’s original. Each individual is assigned to a unique case.
Files labeled "family" facilitate parent-offspring comparisons. Second-generation immigrants are assigned to cases, with data for each descendant’s mother and father assigned as variables.

Both data structures are available as SPSS files (.sav) and as ASCII text.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: human biology; stature; cephalic index; race; immigration; plasticity; biological anthropology

Geographic Coverage: New York, NY

Collection Date(s): 1908 – 1910

Universe: Immigrants and their offspring in New York City from seven groups: Bohemian, Central Italian, Hebrew, Hungarian and Slovak, Polish, Scotch, and Sicilian.

Data Type(s): other

Collection Notes: See Boas's original publications on the immigrant study for technical details about the collection of anthropometric data. See Gravlee et al. (2003) for details about data entry and data quality in the machine-readable files.

Methodology

Data Source: Boas, Franz. 1928. Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man. Vol. VI, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Published Versions

V2 [2019-09-28]

V1 [2019-09-28]

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