Household Transitions in Grassland Settlement: The View from Kansas

Myron P. Gutmann, University of Michigan
Susan Hautaniemi Leonard, University of Michigan
Glenn D. Deane, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY)

In the Demography and Environment in Grasslands Settlement project, we hypothesize a human imprint on the Plains environment where the cumulative impacts of household-level processes on landscape-level dynamics were the result of historical give and take between family forms and land use. Building on earlier work that showed a settlement by households at various stages, and key roles for environment and ethnicity, in this paper we explore household lifecycle transitions across Kansas from earliest Euro-American settlement through the development of a land-use system that remains the visible organizing principle of the landscape to this day. We estimate a series of three-level (or mixed) regressions with repeated measures (time is therefore the first-level unit) of household form nested within households and households nested within environmental region, to look at household transitions that model change in household life cycle location between censuses based on household characteristics at the beginning of the interval.