Geissler's Data on the Human Sex Ratio

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).

Usage

data(Geissler)

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.

Source

Edwards, A. W. F. (1958). An Analysis Of Geissler's Data On The Human Sex Ratio. Annals of Human Genetics, 23, 6-15.

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.

See also

Saxony, containing the data for families of size 12.

Examples

data(Geissler)
str(Geissler)
#> 'data.frame':	90 obs. of  4 variables:
#>  $ boys : int  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
#>  $ girls: num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#>  $ size : num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#>  $ Freq : int  108719 42860 17395 7004 2839 1096 436 161 66 30 ...

# 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)
#> boys
#>    0    1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9   10   11   12 
#>    3   24  104  286  670 1033 1343 1112  829  478  181   45    7 

# 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