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Help[Opinions] Errors in Coding
in reply to a message by Pie
I believe that it's rather common for there to be errors in the data processing where the sex was incorrectly entered. In 1989, Jennifer is listed as the 821 boys name, I remember reading that was an error.
According to the BabynameWizard.com FAQ
Girls named George? Boys named Christ? Whoa!
The data, especially from the earliest years of the sample, reflect some artifacts of the data entry process. A century ago, names like George, William and Christopher were routinely written as abbreviations (Geo, Wm, Christ). Coding errors, where the wrong sex was marked on a form, were also more likely to slip through back then. If a name was extremely common, these errors and abbreviations could end up among the 1000 top listings. Eliminating these names would introduce new errors and biases into the data, so they've been included as reported in the original SSA figures. But no, I don't believe there really were hundreds of girls named George.
According to the BabynameWizard.com FAQ
Girls named George? Boys named Christ? Whoa!
The data, especially from the earliest years of the sample, reflect some artifacts of the data entry process. A century ago, names like George, William and Christopher were routinely written as abbreviations (Geo, Wm, Christ). Coding errors, where the wrong sex was marked on a form, were also more likely to slip through back then. If a name was extremely common, these errors and abbreviations could end up among the 1000 top listings. Eliminating these names would introduce new errors and biases into the data, so they've been included as reported in the original SSA figures. But no, I don't believe there really were hundreds of girls named George.
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Ah, thanks for that. My first thought was that it must be an error, but there were just so many of them - and Mary, and various others, are listed as boy's names in rather a lot of the US popularity charts, so I just had to ask. I guess this sort of thing just slips through on any large collection of data: an ancestor of mine is listed in the 1881 census as 'Hammerley' which is the weirdest transcription of Emily I've ever seen. :)
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Yes, this.
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