Demography

• Demography is mostly quantitative: demographers obtain data generally from censuses, statistical analyses, and surveys
• 1. Demography is interdisciplinary: it draws concepts from other fields like sociology, biology, economics, history, etc.
• Demography is applicable: it can be used to study or formulate public policies
• Censuses were conducted in ancient times for taxation, military recruitment, and land grants: Persian Empire in 500/499 BCE and Han Dynasty in China in 2 CE
• In the 17th century, demography marked its birth and development as a scientific discipline
• John Graunt (1620-1674) created the first table for the population in England which included mortality rate and predicted percentages of the population.
• Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was one of the pioneers in the formal study of population who probed the impact of a great increase in population will affect human welfare through a decrease in resources; which is why, according to him, there should be a balance
• Alfred Lotka (1880-1949) argued that mathematics is necessary in examining population growth rates, as well as birth and death rates
• The data used for demography are obtained from the following: 

  
  

  census (a count of a population with all individual units such as people and households)

  
  

  registers (a database containing information on a complete group of units)
• Formal demography: develops and applies new methods for the analyses of demographic data
• Social demography: uses demographic data in explaining and predicting social phenomena such as the relationship between disasters and population growth of a certain area