Demography

Demography

Demography is a broad social science discipline. (“What is Demography”) The word ‘demography’ comes from the Greek word ‘demos’, which means population and ‘graphy’, which means to describe or draw. (Luczkovich) In it’s most simplistic terms, demography is the study of how human population changes. Various data is collected and then analyzed to see how populations have changed over a period of time, and to predict how they will act in the future. These changes occur due to births, deaths, immigration, emigration, and natural aging. Demography can be studied as a study of the Earth’s entire population, or by specific groups such as: geographic area, age, gender, race, nationality, and a variety of other aspects.

More specifically, however,

demographers deal with the collection, presentation and analysis of data relating to the basic life-cycle events and experiences of people: birth, marriage, divorce, household and family formation, employment, ageing, migration and death. The discipline emphasizes empirical investigation of population processes, including the conceptualization and measurement of these processes and the study of their determinants and consequences. Practitioners frequently draw on related disciplinary areas - sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, psychology, public health and ecology - to illuminate their analyses. They may explore biological and biosocial aspects of fertility and mortality in areas such as reproductive health and epidemiology. (“What is Demography”)

Demography goes one step further. It also involves dealing with the study of social and economic change, and how changes in demography affect the environment. Concepts such as: life tables, population momentum and stable populations, have allowed society to better understand social change. As an offshoot, demography has spurred vast amounts of literature on topics such as: health and morbidity, family systems, women’s roles in society, and the cultural context of changes in demography. (“What is Demography”)

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Demography is utilized by a wide array of people, for a variety of tasks. Social researchers gather and utilize demographic information. The study of demography is utilized in government for planning and administration. This information can be utilized for educational planning, labor market analysis, and social policy development. Market researchers, in the private sector, utilize demography in the development and promotion of their products, as well as for investment planning. (“What is Demography”)

A large amount of information must first be gathered to study the various facets of

demography. This information is collected via census return, birth records, marriage records, and death records. In many countries, especially those that are underdeveloped, this data is unreliable at times, making the analysis even more difficult. (“Demography”)

All of these dynamics correlate to two basic factors that are taken into account in demographic studies. Age distribution of a population is the first factor. And, how a population size changes over a period of time is the second factor. It is these factors that make up the rates that are used to quantify how the population is changing, and why.

The crude birth rate, of a population, is one such rate taken into consideration when studying demography. This data comprises the number of live births per thousand people annually. (“Demography”) In addition to this data, the general fertility rate is also taken into account.

The general fertility rate is defined as the number of live births per thousand

women, of childbearing age, annually. In addition, age-specific fertility rates may be gathered, taking only data from specified age groups, such as women age 15 to 19 or 20 to 24. This data helps define the total fertility rate, which is the number of women, completing childbearing age that would be reproducing given the age-specific fertility rate. This data is complimentary to the gross reproduction rate, which is the number of females that would be expected to be born to a woman who was completing her reproductive life, again, given the age-specific fertility rates of the population. This then leads to the net reproduction rate, which is the number of females that would be born, given the age-specific fertility and mortality rates for her population, to a woman of

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