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).

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

Source

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

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.

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