Historical demography: demographic changes and the history of the fieldof demography as a discipline 1945-2013

The scope of demography as a discipline has witnessed several changes in last five to six decades to match the issues pertaining to growth, distribution and welfare of population. India, with a huge population size coupled with enormous socioeconomic, cultural and regional heterogeneity has long been one of the most legendary laboratories for demographers across the world towards understanding the complex theories in Demography and Population Studies. This change has also been experienced among Indian Demographers and research institutions like International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India which has contributed immensely in India’s Demographic and Population research in last fifty years. This article tries to trace the changes in the research areas conducted at IIPS, and associate these changes with changing scope of demography based on historical content analyses of the IIPS researches conducted during 1957-2007.

Community detection in scientific networks has become an increasingly common strategy for evaluating how readily a scientific community is marked by division into uniquely identifiable segments (or communities). Demography is a field that draws from many academic disciplines and has internal explicit foci on different subjects, each of which could generate substantial segmentation of the field as a whole. We have little evidence of how integrative across those domains Demography is, or whether each comprises unique non-overlapping scientific communities. This paper uses a database of all papers published in four major general demography journals over several decades to examine the patterns of community segmentation within the field, to examine what are the primary drivers of the observed levels of network segmentation, and what researchers and/or research subjects serve as intermediaries between those identified communities.

There is an argument that a discipline does not exist until it has formal associations and institutions. The first formal associations and institutions in the field of population studies date from the 1920s. While the history of the discipline itself lies further back in academic studies in Europe, the history of the discipline’s associations lies mainly in the United States and the initial driving forces were philanthropists and advocates rather than scientists. Because of these initial driving forces, from the beginning, population associations were faced with the question of whether or not the association should take a formal position on political or social issues relating to population. Through this lens of science or advocacy, the paper examines the comparative histories of the two oldest population associations, the Population Association of America and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

The importance of this project and its unpublished archival documents, According to research on the sources of poverty, population issues prior to 1956, may help researchers to document information such as economic issues, demographics and population, the number of livestock and crops, the number of households in urban and rural displacement of ethnic and immigration as one of the most original and authoritative sources and use of statistics. Although in recent years much work has been done to understand the problems of the world population, But for various reasons, including failure of the census and statistics provided are only estimates and speculation, a lot of inconsistencies between the information sought is present investigation.
This study for the first time in the field of historical studies of Iran have been conducted using archival documents. Includes the process of identifying and delivering data over the past 150 years and consists of the Iranian population is a database of historical documents. The present article reviews the stages of the project, the efficiency and experience of using archival documents, historical demographic studies to objectively explain.

A rapid process of aging currently visible everywhere in the developed world promises to be one of the major social and economic issues affecting societies for much of the twenty-first century, in particular in the coming decades. This process is not uniform, a fact that conditions its socioeconomic impact and leads to different types of policy. It can be shown that the specific shape of the aging process is the result of the way each country underwent its own particular cycle of fertility boom and fertility bust in its more or less recent past. In this paper time series data from a set of 24 countries in the developed world will be used in order to assess the way they underwent the boom and bust cycle and how this cycle affects the process of aging currently and in the future. Measures of the intensity and duration of both boom and bust will be proposed and results discussed. It will be shown that the intensity of the baby bust tends to be closely linked to the intensity of the baby boom, and both are linked to pre-war fertility levels. Policy implications of different patterns of aging will be discussed.

During the central decades of twentieth century the historical process of demographic transition was interrupted by a period of unexpected growing fertility that was called the baby boom. Up to the present the baby boom has been studied mainly in advanced societies. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of extending the analysis of baby boom to developing countries in order to find out whether we can properly speak of a baby boom among these non-developed populations. The paper provides a detailed description of baby boom from a comparative perspective (thirteen countries from four continents are included in the analysis) and it is based on a cohort approach to fertility. To this effect data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International (IPUMS) are used. Data analysis shows that, with some exceptions, the baby boom was a global demographic phenomenon, although with important variations in terms of intensity, timing, and duration. Preliminary conclusions point to the fact that, in general, the baby boom was stronger in developing than in developed countries (with the very significant exception of USA).