The Character of the Field of Demography
The Topics of Investigation
Demography is the statistical study of human populations, including their size, composition, and geographical distribution, and of the processes of change in these elements. Demographers focus on childbearing (fertility), death (mortality), and geographical moves (migration), but they also cover other processes, like the formation and dissolution of (marital and nonmarital) unions, the transition out of the parental home, and other transitions relevant to population structure and population trends. As a field of inquiry, Demography has roots going back to John Graunt’s famous study of the bills of mortality (1662) and to T. R. Malthus’s essay on the principle of population (1798). For an account of how the endeavors of demographers have developed into a discipline, see Hodgson (2001), Szreter (2001), and Caldwell, 2003). For more extensive accounts about the field of demography, see Rosenzweig and Stark (1997) and...
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References and Further Reading
Basu A, Aaby P (1998) The methods and the uses of anthropological demography. Clarendon Press, Oxford
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Szsreter, Simon (2001) Demography, history of. In: Smelser N, Baltes P (eds) International encyclopedia of the social and Behavioral Sciences, vol 5. Pergamon, Oxford, pp 3488–3493
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Hoem, J.M. (2011). Demography. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_205
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