Broadening demographic horizons: demographic studies beyond age and gender

Abstract

Demography is generally defined as the scientific study of changes in the size and the structure of populations. While the meaning of population size is relatively clear, there are many different population structures that can be analyzed. Demography conventionally focuses on age and sex structures, and many of our core models are defined in terms of age and sex. But there are other important dimensions that are the subject of demographic analysis and modelling, such as place of residence, ethnicity/race, marital status, educational attainment, labor force participation status, and health status. Explicitly addressing the changing structures of populations along these broader demographic dimensions make demography more relevant for the rest of the world. Moreover, as these dimensions often represent important sources of population heterogeneity, studying them can improve our understanding of population dynamics in itself. In recent years, there have been exciting developments that have broadened the demographic perspective along these lines of multi-dimensionality, and that have contributed new methods to the demographer’s conventional tool kit. This volume of the Yearbook presents a selected set of papers that in one way or another challenge conventional ideas about how demographic studies are conceived and carried out. These papers cover concepts and developments related to multiregional, multistate, and probabilistic population forecasts; population projections by education and labor force status; and causal models of migration.