Quantifying paradigm change in demography

Jakub Bijak; Daniel Courgeau; Eric Silverman; Robert Franck

doi:10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32

Quantifying paradigm change in demography

Jakub Bijak, Daniel Courgeau, Eric Silverman, Robert Franck

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

165 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background: Demography is a uniquely empirical research area amongst the social sciences. We posit that the same principle of empiricism should be applied to studies of the population sciences as a discipline, contributing to greater self-awareness amongst its practitioners.

Objective: The paper aims to include measurable data in the study of changes in selected demographic paradigms and perspectives.

Methods: The presented analysis is descriptive and is based on a series of simple measures obtained from the free online tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, which includes frequencies of word groupings (n-grams) in different collections of books digitised by Google.

Results: The tentative findings corroborate the shifts in the demographic paradigms identified in the literature -- from cross-sectional, through longitudinal, to event-history and multilevel approaches.

Conclusions: These findings identify a promising area of enquiry into the development of demography as a social science discipline. We postulate that more detailed enquiries in this area in the future could lead to establishing History of Population Thought as a new sub-discipline within population sciences.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	911-924
Journal	Demographic Research
Volume	30
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32
Publication status	Published - 25 Mar 2014

Bibliographical note

All work published in Demographic Research is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, 2.0 Germany. For full details see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/deed.en [Accessed: 19/04/2016]

Access to Document

10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32

Published versionFinal published version, 532 KBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/

Cite this

@article{6d9a0d9dfad54f73a054cd58623697f5,

title = "Quantifying paradigm change in demography",

abstract = "Background: Demography is a uniquely empirical research area amongst the social sciences. We posit that the same principle of empiricism should be applied to studies of the population sciences as a discipline, contributing to greater self-awareness amongst its practitioners.Objective: The paper aims to include measurable data in the study of changes in selected demographic paradigms and perspectives.Methods: The presented analysis is descriptive and is based on a series of simple measures obtained from the free online tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, which includes frequencies of word groupings (n-grams) in different collections of books digitised by Google.Results: The tentative findings corroborate the shifts in the demographic paradigms identified in the literature -- from cross-sectional, through longitudinal, to event-history and multilevel approaches.Conclusions: These findings identify a promising area of enquiry into the development of demography as a social science discipline. We postulate that more detailed enquiries in this area in the future could lead to establishing History of Population Thought as a new sub-discipline within population sciences.",

author = "Jakub Bijak and Daniel Courgeau and Eric Silverman and Robert Franck",

note = "All work published in Demographic Research is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, 2.0 Germany. For full details see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/deed.en [Accessed: 19/04/2016]",

year = "2014",

month = mar,

day = "25",

doi = "10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32",

language = "English",

volume = "30",

pages = "911--924",

journal = "Demographic Research",

issn = "1435-9871",

publisher = "Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research/Max-Planck-institut fur Demografische Forschung",

}

TY - JOUR

T1 - Quantifying paradigm change in demography

AU - Bijak, Jakub

AU - Courgeau, Daniel

AU - Silverman, Eric

AU - Franck, Robert

N1 - All work published in Demographic Research is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, 2.0 Germany. For full details see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/deed.en [Accessed: 19/04/2016]

PY - 2014/3/25

Y1 - 2014/3/25

N2 - Background: Demography is a uniquely empirical research area amongst the social sciences. We posit that the same principle of empiricism should be applied to studies of the population sciences as a discipline, contributing to greater self-awareness amongst its practitioners.Objective: The paper aims to include measurable data in the study of changes in selected demographic paradigms and perspectives.Methods: The presented analysis is descriptive and is based on a series of simple measures obtained from the free online tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, which includes frequencies of word groupings (n-grams) in different collections of books digitised by Google.Results: The tentative findings corroborate the shifts in the demographic paradigms identified in the literature -- from cross-sectional, through longitudinal, to event-history and multilevel approaches.Conclusions: These findings identify a promising area of enquiry into the development of demography as a social science discipline. We postulate that more detailed enquiries in this area in the future could lead to establishing History of Population Thought as a new sub-discipline within population sciences.

AB - Background: Demography is a uniquely empirical research area amongst the social sciences. We posit that the same principle of empiricism should be applied to studies of the population sciences as a discipline, contributing to greater self-awareness amongst its practitioners.Objective: The paper aims to include measurable data in the study of changes in selected demographic paradigms and perspectives.Methods: The presented analysis is descriptive and is based on a series of simple measures obtained from the free online tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, which includes frequencies of word groupings (n-grams) in different collections of books digitised by Google.Results: The tentative findings corroborate the shifts in the demographic paradigms identified in the literature -- from cross-sectional, through longitudinal, to event-history and multilevel approaches.Conclusions: These findings identify a promising area of enquiry into the development of demography as a social science discipline. We postulate that more detailed enquiries in this area in the future could lead to establishing History of Population Thought as a new sub-discipline within population sciences.

U2 - 10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32

DO - 10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32

M3 - Article

SN - 1435-9871

VL - 30

SP - 911

EP - 924

JO - Demographic Research

JF - Demographic Research

ER -

Quantifying paradigm change in demography

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Access to Document

Fingerprint

Cite this