Home
As part of their second year of Master of Demography"The study of changes in the number of births, marriages, deaths, etc. in a particular area during a period of time" Cambridge Dictionary from the Institute of Demography of Paris 1 University (Institut de Démographie de l’Université Paris 1, IDUP), Romane Beaufort and Lucas Melissent produced some final term essays focused on Westeros demography. For a few months, they created a database merging 398 named characters of Game of Thrones, for which 50 information are inquired. The goal of the studies was to look for links between some characteristics and death.
Right after graduating, as fresh demographers"a person who studies changes in numbers of births, marriages, deaths, etc. in an area over a period of time" Cambridge Dictionary whose gained their professors respect, the dynamic duo could not stop to investigate their beloved subject. They were sick, definitely sick. Their need to continue gnawed them so much that they decided to popularize their academics studies and create a website to spread them all around!
On the left: Romane Beaufort. On the right: Lucas Melissent. On the middle: the superb promotion of students of Master of Demography
Today, Romane works for the French National Pension Fund Agency (Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse, CNAV). In a team of statisticians, she contributes to understand retirement factors. Their main model to predict retirement behavior utilize many logistic regressions.
Today, Lucas works for the French National Gendarmerie (Direction Générale de la Gendarmerie Nationale, DGGN), where he projects manpower. Among sociologists and demographers, he contributes to realize many socio-demographic studies.
Before starting to collect data, the two demographers had to define their study population. It musted be sufficient to allow significant results, but they also had to construct it basically from scratch in a very little time. To achieve this, they choose to focus only on named characters in the scenario.
Romane and Lucas make up a fist character list leaning on the allociné website, and complete it with the fandom website data.
They thus got 370 characters, to whom they added some other discovered while watching the series. The final study population is constituted of 398 characters, whose 14 animals (3 dragons).
For each of them, about 50 characteristics are required. Some are very usual in demographic studies: age, gender, marital status, place of birth and living, nobility rank, etc.
Authors followed their instinct about the others variables, after watching the series or reading some related articles: number of betrayals, number of victims killed by the character, popularity (from a 4 milions people survey), unpopularity, number of appearances, allegiance, number of nude scenes per character, etc.
