Franz Boas's Immigrant Study

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 shapeâ¿¿long thought to be a fixed, purely hereditary marker of raceâ¿¿was in fact sensitive to changes in environment within a single generation.<br><br>Boasâ¿¿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 Boasâ¿¿s data set.<br><br>The data are provided in two structures:Files labeled "master" are formatted to match Boasâ¿¿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 descendantâ¿¿s mother and father assigned as variables.<br>Both data structures are available as SPSS files (.sav) and as ASCII text.<br>

1910年，弗朗茨·博厄斯（Franz Boas）发表了其经典研究《移民后代身体形态的变化》的首批成果。这项具有里程碑意义的工作甫一问世便引发广泛争议，因其挑战了当时诸多关于人类生物学与种族的主流认知。彼时最引人瞩目的研究发现为：长期以来被视为固定不变、纯粹由遗传决定的种族标志性特征——头型，实际上在单一代际内就会因环境变化而发生改变。

博厄斯针对这场争议最具说服力的回应，是于1928年出版了长达504页的该移民研究的原始手写数据集《人类遗传研究资料》（纽约：哥伦比亚大学出版社）。他解释道：“将这些数据公开可及实属必要，因为诸多与遗传及环境影响相关的问题，均可借助该材料展开探讨。”秉持同样的学术理念，我们在此提供可机器读取的数据集，该数据集正是我们对博厄斯原始数据集进行重新分析的基础。

本数据集包含两种数据结构：标注为“master”的文件格式与博厄斯的原始数据格式完全一致，每个个体均对应唯一的研究个案。标注为“family”的文件则便于开展亲子对比分析：第二代移民作为子代被分配至各研究个案，其父母的相关数据均作为变量纳入其中。两种数据结构均提供SPSS格式（.sav）与ASCII文本格式两种版本。