Quantifying paradigm change in demography

Jakub Bijak, Robert Franck, Eric Silverman and Daniel Courgeau
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Jakub Bijak: University of Southampton
Robert Franck: Université catholique de Louvain
Eric Silverman: University of Southampton

Demographic Research, 2014, vol. 30, issue 32, 911-924

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.

Keywords: demographic paradigms; empiricism; Google books; history of demography; N-grams (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:demres:v:30:y:2014:i:32

DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32

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