Title:	Model-Based Demography
Authors:	Thomas K. Burch
Keywords:	Theory
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The papers in this collection – most of them previously published – are the fruits of an intellectual odyssey over the last decades of my career as a sociologist/demographer. Beginning in the late 1980s, longstanding questions about the status of demography as a science came to the surface, and I began to pursue them actively. Looking back, I realize that at some point I became less a demographer and more a demography critic – cf. art critic or music critic – and an amateur philosopher of science. My central concern has been with the role and status of theory in demography. For some, it was enough that demography did rigorous analysis of data using standard demographic and statistical techniques, notably emerging methods of multivariate analysis as applied to micro-data files. Theoretical explanations and models of behavioral processes often were left to other disciplines. Becker and the microeconomists had become the leading theorists of demographic behavior, while social demographers made relatively little systematic use of the large fund of relevant theory from sociology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology. Microeconomic theory enjoyed widespread acceptance, if not consensus, among economists. And it was stated in clear, unambiguous form, often mathematically. Social-behavioral theory, by contrast, was formulated with less rigor, in loose verbal form, and commanded nothing approaching consensus. As a graduate student in sociology and demography in the late 1950s, I had taken several excellent courses on social theory and cultural anthropology (Wilbert Moore; Marion J. Levy, Jr.; and Melvin Tumin) and trained in demography and statistics with leaders in the field – Frank Notestein, Ansley Coale, and Frederick Stephan. But there was little integration. My dissertation was a largely technical work on measurement of internal migration, with virtually no behavioral content and no theory. Some of my sociology professors were dismayed. My demography and statistics professors were satisfied if not ecstatic. As I pursued my career, I lived this schizoid life as an empirical demographer with an interest in theory – a small example of the split between theory and empirical research famously described by Robert Merton (1957). With a primary commitment to demography, my relationship to theory, like that of the discipline, was characterized by ambivalence and malaise.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55590
ISBN:	978-3-319-65433-1
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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