How far have we progressed? Qualitative research in demography during the 21st century

Despite its quantitative tradition, demography has become more aligned with qualitative research over the past 15 years. There has been a growing recognition that quantitative research offers little information about ideals, motivations, intentions, cultural aspects, and processes that surround demographic events. Therefore, many of the important questions relating to demography cannot be answered through the sole use of a quantitative approach. The objective of the paper is to investigate the production of qualitative research in demography during the 21st century. The analysis is based on the articles published in four major journals: Demography, Demographic Research, Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População - REBEP, and Revista Latinoamericana de Población- RELAP. We quantify the papers that use qualitative techniques, their authors and institutional affiliations, countries/regions under study, while also qualifying the findings by answering the following question: what have we learned from these qualitative studies that we would not have learned from quantitative data? Using content analysis, we investigate the papers published in all volumes of the journals between 2001 and 2013, except for RELAP, which was first published in 2007. The papers published in these four jorunals are predominantly quantitative.