Model-Based Demography

This open access book describes demography as an autonomous science, not just a branch of applied statistics

Provides a new view of demography, based on 21st century philosophy of science Points the way toward integration of data, technique and theory

Autorentext

After completing his graduate work in sociology and demography at the Office of Population

Research, Princeton University, Thomas Burch taught at Marquette, and at Georgetown University, where he helped found the Center for Population Research. From 1970 to 1975 he served in the Demographic Division [Associated Director] of The Population Council. He then joined the University of Western Ontario to help develop a new Ph.D. program in social demography. He was elected President of the Canadian Population Society in 1992-94, and received that organization's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Currently he is Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria and Research Affiliate of the Centre for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington. His main research interests have been fertility, marriage and divorce, household and family structure, and kinship. He has had an abiding interest in demographic theory, and concern over the relative neglect of the ory by the discipline. In the 1990's, he began to develop a new vision for the codification, presentation, and future development of demography, based on the 'semantic' or 'model-based' approach to the philosophy of science. In this view of demography, technique, empirical research and theory are in better balance. And demography is seen to have more good theory than is generally realized.

Inhalt
Part I: A Model-Based View of Demography: 1. Demography in a New Key: A Theory of Population Theory.- 2. Data, Models and Reality: The Structure of Demographic Knowledge.- 3. Computer Modeling of Theory: Explanation for the 21st Century.- 4. Computer Simulation and Statistical Modeling: Rivals or Complements?.- 5. Does Demography Need Differential Equations? Part II: Some Demographic Models Re-visited: 6. Theory, Computers and the Parametrization of Demographic Behavior.- 7. Estimating the Goodman, Keyfitz, Pullum Kinship Equations: An Alternative Procedure.- 8. The Life Table as a Theoretical Model.- 9. The Cohort-Component Projection Algorithm: Technique, Model and Theory.- 10. The Cohort-Component Projection Model: A Strange Attractor for Demographers Part III: Teaching Demography: 11. Teaching Demography: Ten Principles and Two Rationales.- 12. Teaching the Fundamentals of Demography: A Model-Based Approach to Family and Fertility,- 13. On Teaching Demography: Some Non-Traditional Guidelines.- Part IV: Conclusion:14 Conclusion.- Index.<p