Demographic training: challenges and new approaches

Spiraling costs of education, agrarian timetables, old pedagogies and long-form lectures are giving way to new ways of delivering content, assessing learning, fostering interaction, and engaging students with courses ranging from hybrid, blended and fully online to MOOCS. This presentation provides a brief overview of new concepts and methods for the use of digital and online tools in instruction and outreach. A video version of this presentation can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKExcm4u0lg

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LGBT population health has emerged as a growing interdisciplinary science to understand these disparities. The “Summer Institute in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Population Health” builds an educational pipeline to channel aspiring research scholars into this field, providing integrated theoretical and analytical training to students who are passionate about LGBT health but not yet engaged in the study of population health. The 4 weeks long Summer Program enrolls 18 Masters and pre-doctoral level students for a week-long Data Analysis Course, a 3 weeks-long Cornerstone Seminar, “Population Research in LGBT Health and Social Life” and a 3 weeks long daily Data Lab for hands-on training in secondary analysis of population research data sets.

Program objectives:
1. Provide in-depth exposure to population research concepts, methodologies, analysis skills and existing secondary data sets;
2. Improve quantitative analysis skills among students who have high potential as population health research scientists before their career trajectories are set;
3. Create opportunities for interaction between promising students and role model research experts in LGBT population health;
4. Influence the career trajectories of promising students in the study of LGBT population health science.

The Demopædia project has set, as a first goal, to give access to demographers all editions of the Multilingual Demographic Dictionary published since the 50's. Computerization has shown that if the first editions were consistent over the 1100 concepts, very large gaps, most often due to omissions undermined the overall quality of the second edition of the multilingual dictionary, 1492 concepts for the French (1981), 1475 for the English (1982), 1495 Spanish (1985),1555 for the German (1987). The harmonization process consists in maximizing the corpus to 1581 concepts. The Communication will review the volumes already harmonized in French and Italian, published or forthcoming, as the new Asian languages that emerged after the workshops of Paris (2007) and Chiang Mai (2012).
If we may regret a modern third edition, this standardization process is a necessary step. The availability of all texts and cross-languages indexes on any kind of media from paper book up to digital tablets is an asset. This harmonization phase is also an opportunity for the community of demographers to prepare the third edition by proposing a succinct definition of new terms or expressions which are emerging on the Open Encyclopedia Population platform both in English and in about 20 languages.

Skilled population have become the global currency of the 21st century. Without proper investment in skills, people suffer on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into economic growth, and countries can no longer compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global society. But this “currency” depreciates as the requirements of labor markets evolve and individuals lose the skills they do not use. Skills do not automatically convert into jobs and growth
Moreover, the global economic crisis, with high levels of unemployment, in particular among youth, has added urgency to fostering better skills. At the same time, rising income inequality, largely driven by inequality in wages between high- and low-skilled workers, also needs to be addressed. the most promising solution to these challenges is investing effectively in skills enhancement throughout the life cycle; from early childhood, through compulsory education, and throughout a working life
Therefore, The OECD has developed a global Skills Strategy as an integrated, cross-government strategic framework that helps countries to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their national skills systems, benchmark them internationally, and develop policies that can transform better skills into better jobs, economic growth and social inclusion
This paper

Hitherto lack of a robust methodological application in demographic transition analysis is the rationale of this study. In an effort to fill this gap, this study advances ‘Change-Point analyzer’ as a new methodological tool for assessment of the progress and changes in population and health indicators. A long-term assessment of ‘change-point analyses’ of trends in population and health indicators such as IMR, LEB, TFR and Population size in India show multiple points of critical changes. The defining feature of ‘change-point analyzer’ is that, it detects subtle changes that are often missed in simple trend line plots and also quantified the volume of change that is not possible in simple trend line plots. Measured change points of demographic and health trends are crucial for understanding the true trajectories of trends and patterns and progress in demographic transition. This study, therefore, adds significantly to the evolutionary interpretation of critical change-points in long-term trajectories of population vis-a-vis population policy shifts in India. Evolutionary interpretation of the long-run trends helps in, not only discussing past and current trends, but provides a number of insights for future directions, which helps in evolution and monitoring of population policies.

I argue that while demography is inherently a spatial science the training many demographers receive in fundamental spatial concepts, geospatial data and analytical methods is often limited, patchwork or nonexistent. However many important demographic questions deserve to be studied and framed using spatial approaches and this will become even more evident as changes in the volume, source, and form of available demographic data – much of it geocoded – further changes the data landscape and thus the methods demographers need to utilize. Ultimately changes in the data demographers use (how they collect, link, and analyze data) suggest the need to train next-generation population scientists in spatial thinking, concepts and methods of analysis. This will be a challenge given the existing logistical constraints on demography training. That is, any emergent method has to compete for its own place within the established curricula which will include core courses (e.g., fertility, migration, mortality), an expansive range of substantive cores (e.g., population and environment, urbanization) and other methods courses (e.g., demographic techniques, event history analysis, multilevel modeling). In this paper I propose and discuss some potential solutions to promoting and facilitating instruction in spatial demography across the globe.