Kari J. Pitkänen (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Career:

When I started my university studies at the University of Helsinki in 1971 I chose history as my major subject. I soon became interested in historical demography and began my slow drift toward demography. Although I studied also social sciences, I graduated in history from the University of Helsinki in 1976. I had already become a research assistant in the Department of Economic and Social History that is a department inclined to "social science history" at the University of Helsinki. I made a long career in the department, first as a junior research scientist and then as a senior research scientist and instructor. In most of my research I focussed on historical demography or long-term demographic developments using the high quality Finnish demographic materials. I obtained my Ph.D. from Helsinki in 1993, on the subject of ‘Deprivation and Disease: Mortality during the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s’. In the same year I became a Project Leader at the newly established Population Research Unit in the Department of Sociology. I became an Associate Professor in 1997, and then a Full Professor of demography in 1999.

Much of my present research activities deal with modern demography, but demographic history is a field I continue to cherish. I am the president of the Finnish Demographic Society.

Selected Publications:

Kari J. Pitkänen: Current Research

My research deals mostly with modern trends in family formation, and the most important materials are the individual-based demographic and other administrative registers. In addition to this I continue with my studies on historical demography. All ongoing historical research focus on long-term developments in Finnish demography and their regional differentials. This line of research should make it obvious why I am interested in the changing boundaries of various reporting units. Two of my research projects are of interest in this context:

• Regional differentials in mortality from the mid-18^th century to the late 19^th century in Finland: A series of regional life tables have been constructed for a number of periods starting from the mid-18^th century and extending to the late 19th century. The life tables are based on statistical materials derived from the well-known Swedish system of population statistics that started in 1749 (when Finland still was part of the Swedish Kingdom). The life tables permit the investigation of regional mortality developments, including rural-urban differences, for different age categories.
• Demographic studies in the Åland Islands, Finland: The records of births, marriages, and deaths have been computerized from the 17^th century up to 1950 for all the communities in the Åland Islands, an archipelago in the Baltic See between mainland Sweden and Finland. The records have been linked to form families and pedigrees and the resulting database can be used to study various aspects of demographic developments in the islands. Initially, the database had scant information on those individuals who had migrated to the archipelago from other regions, or alternatively, had left the islands and migrated to other regions. Some indications in the materials suggested that the common perception of negligible in-migration to the islands could be erroneous. This led to the next step of the project. Presently, the Communion Books (listing of the parishioners) of the Åland church parishes are being reviewed and all those individuals who have a place of birth outside the archipelago are entered in another computerized batabase. The number of these individuals is substantial, indicating a lower-than-expected degree of isolation. After the data entry has been completed and the materials have been linked to the original database, migration patterns of the non-born Ålanders can be examined.

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