Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis – serie

This book deals with models that can capture the behavior of individuals and groups over time. Organizationally, it is divided into three parts. Part I discusses the basic, decrement-only, life table and its associated stable population. Part II examines multistate (or increment-decrement) models and provides the first comprehensive treatment of those extremely flexible and useful life table models. Part III looks at "two-sex" models, which simultaneously incorporate the marriage or fertility behavior of males and females. Those models are explored more fully and completely here than has been the case to date, and the importance of including the experience of both sexes is demonstrated analytically as weil as empirically. In sum, this book considers a broad range of population models with a view to showing that such models can be eminently calculable, clearly interpretable, and analytically valuable for the study of many kinds of social behavior. Four appendixes have been added to make the book more usable. Appendix A provides abrief introduction to calculus and matrix algebra so that readers can understand, though not necessarily derive, the equations presented. Appendix B provides an index of the principal symbols used. Appendix C gives the answers to the exercises found at the end of each chapter. Those exercises should be seen as an extension of the text, and are intended to inform as weil as to challenge.

This book is intended as a relatively nontechnica1 introduction to eurrent demographie methods. It has been several years in preparation, beginning from occasional class handouts I wrote to elaborate on essential points of demographie methodology. Its growth from scattered notes to an integrated text was a natural process, if a gradual one. The eontent of the book addresses three objectives. first, I have tried to avoid demographie methods that are now dated. In some ehapters, that has meant eoncentrating on formulas most demographers recognize. In the ehap­ ters on life tables, it meant testing competing formulas on a variety of real and synthetie data se.ts, and dropping or relegating to footnotes those that were least accurate. Second, I have attempted to give readers a sense of the limits of different formulas and methods. I am a terse writer, however, and for the reader that means most sentences carry weight. Chapters should be read attentively, with careful regard to commentary as weIl as to formulas and examples. Finally, I have tried to make the principal methodologies of the book accessible, by offering explanations for formulas that are not obvious, by keeping examples to the forefront, and by placing relatively specialized topics in ehapter appendices.

Although I feel honored to write a foreword for this important book, it is a task that I approach with some trepidation. The topics covered in the book summarize the current state of the art in technical demography. However, my knowledge and expertise with respect to technical demography are limited to the most fundamental and intermediate-level methods; hence, critical commentary on the contents of this volume is beyond my scope in this fore­ word. Since I have some understanding of the logic and substantive aspects of the methods rather than the complicated mathematics used in describing them, my comments will necessarily be restricted to the book's general or­ ganization and content. To date, most texts published on technical demography have been limited to traditional demographic methods: sources and limitations of data, life table construction and applications, standardization techniques, various methods for preparing population estimates and forecasts, etc. However, population specialists have in recent years been developing and successfully applying a variety of sophisticated techniques not covered in the more standard intro­ ductory texts. In addition, many traditional methods that are unique to the demographic discipline have been improved and extended.

Student~ interested in world populations and demography inevitably need to know China. As the most populous country of the world, China occupies a unique position in the world population system. How its population is shaped by the intricate interplays among factors such as its political ideology and institutions, economic reality, government policies, sociocultural traditions, and ethnic divergence represents at once a fascinating and challenging arena for investigatIon and analysis. Yet, for much of the 20th century, while population studies have developed into a mature science, precise information and sophisticated analysis about the Chinese population had largely remained either lacking or inaccessible, first because of the absence of systematic databases due to almost uninterrupted strife and wars, and later because the society was closed to the outside observers for about three decades since 1949. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, things have dramatically changed. China has embarked on an ambitious reform program where modernization became the utmost goal of societal mobilization. China could no longer afford to rely on imprecise census or survey information for population-related studies and policy planning, nor to remaining closed to the outside world. Both the gathering of more precise information and access to such information have dramatically increased in the 1980s. Systematic observations, analyses and reporting about the Chinese population have surfaced in the population literature around the globe.

Student~ interested in world populations and demography inevitably need to know China. As the most populous country of the world, China occupies a unique position in the world population system. How its population is shaped by the intricate interplays among factors such as its political ideology and institutions, economic reality, government policies, sociocultural traditions, and ethnic divergence represents at once a fascinating and challenging arena for investigatIon and analysis. Yet, for much of the 20th century, while population studies have developed into a mature science, precise information and sophisticated analysis about the Chinese population had largely remained either lacking or inaccessible, first because of the absence of systematic databases due to almost uninterrupted strife and wars, and later because the society was closed to the outside observers for about three decades since 1949. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, things have dramatically changed. China has embarked on an ambitious reform program where modernization became the utmost goal of societal mobilization. China could no longer afford to rely on imprecise census or survey information for population-related studies and policy planning, nor to remaining closed to the outside world. Both the gathering of more precise information and access to such information have dramatically increased in the 1980s. Systematic observations, analyses and reporting about the Chinese population have surfaced in the population literature around the globe.

Susan M. De Vos uses comparative and life course perspectives to provide an in-depth demographic study of the household. Based on data gathered by the World Fertility Survey, this illuminating reference explores household composition in six Latin American countries and compares the situation with that in the United States and western Europe as well as with each other. The study examines the complex household; non-family household living; and the living arrangements of children, young adults, middle-aged people, and elderly people.

Oscar Harkavy offers a unique insider's view of the fascinating world of population politics. Chapters trace the growth of the movement as well as the various foundations, governments, and intergovernmental organizations which were an integral part of it from its beginning in the 1950s, through its growth during the 60s and 70s, to the present. Topics include the role of social science in understanding the causes and effects of population growth; reproductive research and contraceptive development; and the politics of family planning, sex education, and abortion in the United States.

In 1992, a summer course 'Demographic Perspectives on Living Arrangements' as well as a one-day workshop 'Recent Issues in Household Modelling' were held in Wassenaar, The Netherlands. This volume is based on the lectures delivered during the summer course, as well as on the presentations made in the workshop. As such, the present volume combines the two elements of transfer of knowledge, on the one hand, and updating the state-of-the-art in the field of household demography, especially in household modelling, on the other hand. In organizing the contents and structure of this volume, we have aimed at creating a book that covers the field of household demography and household modelling in a certain logical and comprehensive way. The purpose of this book is to offer a comprehensive treatment of recent developments in various aspects of the growing field of household demography. Since these recent developments have particularly occurred in household analysis and modelling, these topics will receive special emphasis. The book was written for demographers, social scientists, and planners who are involved in the study and projection of popUlation in general, and of households in particular.

A Primer of Population Dynamics introduces to the basics of population studies.

The completion of this volume would not have been possible without the generous and dedicated help of numerous people. The book had its genesis in a conference held at Cornell University in the fall of 1990 that was organized by Dudley Poston, Paul Eberts, and Michael Hannan, all professors at the time at Cornell. With the very generous financial assistance of David Call, then the dean of Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Poston, Eberts, and Hannan put together a two-day conference oflectures and papers by human ecologists from Cornell University and elsewhere. The conference focused on sociological human ecology and celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Amos Hawley's Human Ecology (Ronald Press 1950). Professor Hawley was the keynote speaker at the conference. Many of the authors of the chapters in this volume presented earlier versions at the Cornell conference in 1990. Cornell's Departments of Rural Sociology and Sociology also contrib­ uted financial assistance; however, without Dean Call's very generous support, the conference would not have been possible. A few months after the conference, Poston and Michael Micklin discussed the possibility of asking the various authors of the Cornell conference papers to revise them for publication in a volume on sociological human ecology. Many opted to do so, but others did not because of time and other kinds of commitments and constraints.

In the 50 years that have passed since Alfred Latka's death in 1949 his position as the father of mathematical demography has been secure. With his first demographic papers in 1907 and 1911 (the latter co­ authored with F. R. Sharpe) he laid the foundations for stable population theory, and over the next decades both largely completed it and found convenient mathematical approximations that gave it practical applica­ tions. Since his time, the field has moved in several directions he did not foresee, but in the main it is still his. Despite Latka's stature, however, the reader still needs to hunt through the old journals to locate his principal works. As yet no exten­ sive collections of his papers are in print, and for his part he never as­ sembled his contributions into a single volume in English. He did so in French, in the two part Theorie Analytique des Associations Biologiques (1934, 1939). Drawing on his Elements of Physical Biology (1925) and most of his mathematical papers, Latka offered French readers insights into his biological thought and a concise and mathematically accessible summary of what he called recent contributions in demographic analy­ sis. We would be accurate in also calling it Latka's contributions in demographic analysis.

This volume marks the culmination of the NOW Priority Programme on Population Issues, an eight-year research programme sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. The contributors evaluate the Priority Programme's research results from an international perspective by comparing and contrasting Dutch population trends with those observed elsewhere, and by assessing the Priority Programme's contributions to the scientific literature.

"Health demography" has come to play an increasingly important role within the larger field since 1980; the number of health professionals who utilize its methods and materials has grown exponentially. In a revision of the first edition of this text and reference, published by Plenum in 1992, the authors convey the general principles that underlie this applied subdiscipline and demonstrate how the merging of demography and health care impacts on the planning processes of a range of health-care organizations.

This text focuses on the methodology and analysis of state and local population projections. It describes the most commonly used data sources and application techniques within each of three classes of projection methods (cohort-component, trend extrapolation, and structural models) and covers the components of population growth, the formation of assumptions, the development of evaluation criteria, and the determinants of forecast accuracy. It considers the strengths and weaknesses of various projection methods, paying special attention to the unique problems of making projections for small areas, and closes with an examination of technological and methodological changes affecting the production of small-area population projections. The authors provide practical guidance to demographers, planners, and other analysts called on to construct state and local population projections. They use many examples and illustrations and present suggestions for dealing with special populations, unique circumstances, and inadequate or unreliable data; they also describe techniques for controlling one set of projections to another and for interpolating between two projections.They discuss the role of judgment and the importance of the political context in which projections are made and emphasize the "utility" of projections, or their usefulness for decision making in a world of competing demands and limited resources. This comprehensive book should provide readers with an understanding not only of the mechanics of commonly used population projection methods, but also of the many complex issues affecting their construction, interpretation, evaluation, and use.

This text focuses on the methodology and analysis of state and local population projections. It describes the most commonly used data sources and application techniques within each of three classes of projection methods (cohort-component, trend extrapolation, and structural models) and covers the components of population growth, the formation of assumptions, the development of evaluation criteria, and the determinants of forecast accuracy. It considers the strengths and weaknesses of various projection methods, paying special attention to the unique problems of making projections for small areas, and closes with an examination of technological and methodological changes affecting the production of small-area population projections. The authors provide practical guidance to demographers, planners, and other analysts called on to construct state and local population projections. They use many examples and illustrations and present suggestions for dealing with special populations, unique circumstances, and inadequate or unreliable data; they also describe techniques for controlling one set of projections to another and for interpolating between two projections.They discuss the role of judgment and the importance of the political context in which projections are made and emphasize the "utility" of projections, or their usefulness for decision making in a world of competing demands and limited resources. This comprehensive book should provide readers with an understanding not only of the mechanics of commonly used population projection methods, but also of the many complex issues affecting their construction, interpretation, evaluation, and use.

African Americans constitute one of the most interesting and dynamic components of the population of the United States. Unfortunately, an accurate assessment of their demographic characteristics is beset by inaccuracies in the underlying data. Using a novel strategy that combines record linkage and demographic/statistical analysis, the authors produce an internally consistent and robust set of estimates of the African-American population during the period 1930-1990. They interpret the record that emerges, with special reference to longevity trends and differentials.

CALVIN L. BEALE In considering how to introduce the subject of rural population change in st the 21 Century, I ?nd myself re?ecting on my own experience as a demographer for the U. S. Department of Agriculture. When I arrived at the Department, the post-World War II modernization of farming was well under way. Each year, my colleague Gladys Bowles and I had the unpopular task of announcing how much the farm population had decreased in the prior year. It was hard to say that the phenomenon was someone’s fault. Dramatic reductions in labor requirements per unit of agricultural output were occurring everywhere and not just in the United States. But politically, blame had to be assigned, and whichever political party was not in the White House was certain to place the blame squarely on the current administration. The demographic consequences of this trend were major. In a 22-year period from 1941 to 1962, the net loss of farm population from migration and cessation of farming averaged over a million people per year. It took eight years after the war before an administration was willing to begin to talk about the need to diversify rural employment. By that time, farm residents had already become a minority of rural people. However, well into the 1970s, I continued to receive inquiries from people who still equated rural with farm or who could not envision what rural-nonfarm people did for a living.

CALVIN L. BEALE In considering how to introduce the subject of rural population change in st the 21 Century, I ?nd myself re?ecting on my own experience as a demographer for the U. S. Department of Agriculture. When I arrived at the Department, the post-World War II modernization of farming was well under way. Each year, my colleague Gladys Bowles and I had the unpopular task of announcing how much the farm population had decreased in the prior year. It was hard to say that the phenomenon was someone’s fault. Dramatic reductions in labor requirements per unit of agricultural output were occurring everywhere and not just in the United States. But politically, blame had to be assigned, and whichever political party was not in the White House was certain to place the blame squarely on the current administration. The demographic consequences of this trend were major. In a 22-year period from 1941 to 1962, the net loss of farm population from migration and cessation of farming averaged over a million people per year. It took eight years after the war before an administration was willing to begin to talk about the need to diversify rural employment. By that time, farm residents had already become a minority of rural people. However, well into the 1970s, I continued to receive inquiries from people who still equated rural with farm or who could not envision what rural-nonfarm people did for a living.

Dynamic Population Models is the first book to comprehensively discuss and synthesize the emerging field of dynamic modeling, i.e. the analysis and application of population models that have changing vital rates. Incorporating the latest research, it includes thorough discussions of population growth and momentum under gradual fertility declines, the impact of changes in the timing of events on fertility measures, and the complex relationship between period and cohort measures. Recently developed models for the analysis of changing mortality are examined, and generalizations of Lotka’s fixed rate stable population model are developed and applied.The book is well organized and clearly written so that it is accessible to those with only a minimal knowledge of calculus. It begins with a review of fixed rate population models, from the basic life table to multistate stable populations. The process of convergence to stability is described, and the regularities underlying change in the size and composition of any population are explored. Techniques for estimating rates from multistate population distributions are presented, and new multi-age, multistate dynamic models are developed. Building on the logical closure of demographic models and the close relationship between population stocks and flows, the book sets forth the latest approaches for capturing population change in a world experiencing profound demographic transformations.

This book aims to show how the multilevel approach successfully overcomes the divisions that emerged during the rise of the social sciences— specifically, here, demography and statistics—from the seventeenth century to the present.

This book treats the topic of gender and demographic behaviour during the life course in a comprehensive fashion. It covers a lot of ground, from the age at first intercourse over union formation and dissolution, fertility, migration, ageing, to excess male mortality, comparing genders behaviour and its determinants. It reports new findings of empirical research, mostly based on data from a number of European countries, making a good use of the Family and Fertility surveys and other international data base. This book is of particular interest to demographers, social scientists, academic scholars and private/ public-sector operators, particularly those who are interested in the roles of men and women, and the factors of possible asymmetries and disadvantages, with direct connections to the population policies.

China has the largest number of elderly persons worldwide. For this book, scholars use the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey datasets to answer numerous questions about aging so as to find clues to how we can all live longer, healthier lives.

This book examines the migration of older persons to rural retirement destinations in the United States. While the majority of older persons are residentially stable, those who migrate are disproportionately likely to move to a rural community. Moreover, with the aging of the baby boom generation, particular rural communities can expect to continue attracting older in-migrants in the future.The book examines rural retirement migration from the older in-migrants’ perspective and from the vantage point of the destination communities to which they move. This integrated micro-macro approach permits the authors to view older in-migrants as embedded in particular types of environments that facilitate and/or constrain their opportunities for productive living during older age. It also permits the examination of positive and negative effects of older in-migration for destination communities. The authors use a multiple methods approach featuring a panel survey of older in-migrants and longer-term older residents, in-depth community case studies and county-level census data analysis to produce a grounded study of population aging in the context of rural society.The analysis examines the challenges and opportunities presented by migration at older ages both for successful aging and for community development. The book pays particular attention to the process through which older in-migrants become socially integrated in their new communities, and it contains rich detail on the social relationships they form, the nature of their civic engagement, and the positive and negative reactions they elicit from longer-term residents.The volume concludes with a thoughtful discussion of policy lessons learned from the research, and with an examination of high priority research needs on retirement migration. From the reviews:"This is not just another book; it is a necessary book, the result of plentiful research and of a balancedwork project." (Environment and Planning A, 2009. Volume 41)

This cutting edge book provides a comprehensive, thoughtful and critical discussion of all aspects involved in the relationship between socioeconomic status, health and mortality. It contains the best available datasets from Denmark and the USA.

China is aging at an extraordinary speed and has the largest quantity of elderly persons in the world. Scholars utilize this unprecedented living experience of human being and the unique Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) datasets with the aim to answer in this volume the following questions critical to the aging population world wide. Is the period of disability compressing or expanding with increasing life expectancy and what factors are associated with these trends in the recent decades? Is it possible to realize morbidity compression with a prolongation of the life span in the future? The first section of the book presents the CLHLS project's study design, sample distribution, contents of data collected, and assessments of age reporting and data quality. The remaining chapters are grouped into sections dealing with the demographic, social, economic, familial and psychological dimensions of healthy longevity. This volume contributes to the development of scientific knowledge related to the "slowing down" of the pace of progression of morbidity with mortality declines at older ages.Research findings reported in this book are instrumental in the ultimate realization of the long-term dream of healthy longevity, that is, not only living longer, but living a healthier life.

China’s concentrated HIV epidemic is on the brink of becoming a generalized one and syphilis infection has become a major public health threat. A better understanding of the proximate social determinants of HIV related to gender will be crucial to effectively curbing HIV and other STIs in China.

The counterfactual approach to estimate effects of causes from quasi-experimental data or from observational studies was first proposed by Rubin in 1974 and further developed by James Heckman and others.This book presents both theoretical contributions and empirical applications of the counterfactual approach to causal inference.

This comprehensive work examines the latest developments in the growing field of household demography focusing on household analysis and modeling. Chapters examine the full range of stages in household projection-including data collection, data analysis, and selection of a projection model. Complete with numerous illustrations, this book is practical rather than conceptual with its exploration of existing models and concrete applications. Topics include historical trends, theories of household formation and dissolution, event-history analysis, multistate models, housing market models, labor market models and much more.

Based on data gathered by the World Fertility Survey, this illuminating reference explores household composition in six Latin American countries and compares the situation with that in the United States and western Europe as well as with each other.