Title:	Emerging Techniques in Applied Demography
Authors:	M. Nazrul Hoque Lloyd B. Potter David A. Swanson
Keywords:	Emerging
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	Applied demography has comfortably settled into a relatively mature and secure niche at the disciplinary intersection of demography, planning, geography, public health, marketing, and several other fields where the concepts, tools, and data of demography find practical application. The idea is hardly new, of course. The application of demographic thinking to contemporary concerns can be traced from the Black Death and the Bills of Mortality, on the other side of the Atlantic, to unemployment in the Depression, the Great Migration, urban consolidation/suburbanization, an outpouring of migration and population redistribution studies, and the early methodological developments in small-area population research in America. The origin of applied demography in the United States is difficult to mark with precision. Much has been written on the topic, including key articles and chapters by authors appearing in this volume. What clearly is part of the established record, however, is that by the 1950s the foundations of applied demography were being erected at the U.S. Census Bureau, in a variety of state agencies, and at several universities. A Census Bureau survey in 1955 identified 39 state agencies (mostly in departments of health – agencies that needed denominators for the construction of vital rates) involved in the production of population estimates. In addition, nine universities were found to be doing research related to population estimates (with this number heavily dominated by bureaus of business research). A decade later, 45 states had official agencies producing population estimates or projections, with the largest growth between 1955 and 1965 represented by the increasing delegation of such activities to state planning and development agencies. These decentralized and fragmented activities sometimes led to confusion on the part of data users, and in 1967 the Census Bureau, working with state governments, established the Federal-State Cooperative Program for Local Population Estimates (FSCPE). While originally established as a partnership program to assist the Census Bureau in developing annual population estimates for counties, another chief objective of the FSCPE was to bring a more coordinated approach to the making of population estimates by having a single agency in each state (designated by the respective governors) working cooperatively with the Bureau for the production of estimates. By the early 1970s a major acceleration in the growth of applied demography was underway, and venues were needed to bring professional applied demographers together. The meetings of the Southern Regional Demographic Group (now the Southern Demographic Association, SDA) quickly became the most popular such venue. By the mid-1970s, many members of the Population Association of America (PAA) were beginning proudly to self-identify as applied demographers. Initially these were demographers working in state and local settings, but soon a small core of business demographers had become allied with the group. The PAA Board granted organizational legitimacy to the group by creating in 1978 a Committee on State and Local Demography (eventually the Committee on Applied Demography), and annual meetings of the PAA began formally to serve as an outlet for reporting a variety of problem-oriented demographic research.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53325
ISBN:	978-94-017-8990-5
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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