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FORMAL POPULATION GEOGRAPHY FALL 2000 |
Instructor: Andrei Rogers
Course Objectives:
Formal Population Geography will focus on the life course as the paradigm for studying social and demographic change and on life events and on cohorts of individuals experiencing such events as the basic units of analysis. Two fundamental and complementary approaches will be examined: the event history approach and the multistate approach. The former perspective focuses on the life course as a sequence of events, the latter views it as a sequence of states (or statuses) occupied. Thus the first approach deals with an event-oriented data structure, whereas the second requires a person-oriented data structure. Event history analysis tends to be characterized as statistical microdemography; multistate demographic analysis tends to be viewed more as mathematical macrodemography.
This course will address demographic analysis from both perspectives. Students will learn how to manipulate demographic data in ways that illuminate patterns of spatial population growth and change. Fertility, mortality, migration, marriage and divorce, health transitions, and labor force participation will be the principal demographic processes that will be examined, and their impacts on population growth rates, compositions, and distributions will be studied. Although there are no strict prerequisites for the course, some familiarity with elementary statistics and computer processing will be assumed. The three texts for the course are Multiregional Demography, by Andrei Rogers (John Wiley, 1995) Event History Analysis, by Kazuo Yamaguchi (Sage, 1991), and Logistic Regression, by Fred Pampel (Sage, 2000). In addition, to supplement the materials covered in the two texts, various books, monographs, and articles will be placed on reserve in the Population Reading Room of IBS Building No.3 at 1424 Broadway.