Demography in service of ‘other’ social sciences
(The article is largely inspired by the work of J. C. Caldwell (1996), Demography and Social Science published in Population Studies)
Demography traditionally defined as the scientific study of population, deals with the structure, cause and consequence of population change. Demographers study the population structure (age and sex), composition (religion, caste, race, linguistic group… ), distribution (over administrative and geographic units), and the vital forces of population change (fertility, mortality, and migration). There are diverging views on whether demography is a discipline, subdiscipline, or Inter-discipline (Stycos, 1987). It is now treated both as a discipline and an Inter discipline (combining biology, anthropology, sociology, geography, and economics). The field of formal demography -deals with mathematical and statistical analysis of the structure, composition and change of population. It contributes to a wide range of social, biological, and health sciences disciplines. Fields such as Social demography deals with the cause and consequence of population change in society. Demography due to its core mathematical foundations of changes, offers a higher degree of predictability and is the closest to the sciences.
All social sciences deal with people, groups, and the phenomena resulting from their individual and collective behaviours. Hence, all social sciences are invariably linked to population. Social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, social history, economics, psychology, criminology, political science, education, law, geography, human ecology, and archaeology (through paleodemography pre historic populations) involve study of population and groups. They have researchers working on the borders between demography and their respective disciplines (Caldwell, 1996). Even fields which closely align with the sciences (treated as semi-social sciences) like epidemiology, public health, and population genetics take the service of demography.
Demography as a tool for social sciences
Demography has sometimes been described as ‘the servant of other social sciences’ as it provides substantial raw material for the study of social, political, and economic change. Demography serves as a foundational tool for social sciences to stand on. I argue that Demography is as fundamental to social sciences, as mathematics to Natural sciences.
Anthropology and Sociology: Spatio-temporal analysis of human populations and their groups forms the base for understanding society and culture. Studying social interactions among humans, the formation of social groups, social hierarchies, and culture needs counting and characterizing the human population. Sociology and Anthropology need population composition data such as gender, race, religion, language, ethnicities, castes, and tribe. These disciplines not only need the numbers in each group, but how they spatially spread across administrative regions and nation-states, and also temporal changes over multiple time scales (decades, centuries or even millennia).
Politics and Political Science: The very foundation of political systems is based on population. Even feudal societies needed to count the population to collect taxes, build armies, and expand their empires. Communist counties needed population figures- to control and engineer society based on their ideology. All modern democratic nation-states count people, their age, gender, and spatial distribution across different constituencies (depending on the level of government). Census is mandated in many Constitutions (including the largest democracies India and US) as it forms the core of electoral democracy. Age structure is important as elections are based on adult franchise. Spatial distribution of population in the administrative divisions as it forms the core of the delimitation of constituencies. Ideally, the delimitation of constituencies should reflect the change in population composition over time. Hence both spatial and temporal distribution of the population is essential. Political science- in addition, needs the composition of the population by race, religion, caste, and ethnicity — to understand the preference of voters and determinants of electoral outcome.
Public Policy: Public policy itself is an inter-discipline (combining: samaaj, sarkaar, and bazaar- society, government, and market) — studying the actions and inactions of governments at all levels. It stands on the pillars of law, politics, bureaucracy, economics, and sociology. Government should respond to the people's needs and preferences. Any policy has a target population and its distribution within Nation states. Any targeted beneficiary schemes need estimation and identification of target population groups (such as Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribes, Women and Children in India). Schemes also need to require identification and enumeration of these groups. Social welfare schemes — whether it is health, education, food security (like PDS), livelihood (like MNREGA), or even new-welfare schemes like subsidized LPG needs calculation of eligible population based on gender, caste, income level, and the poverty line. Welfare schemes for migrants- (rural-urban, inter-state or seasonal migrants) need a proper estimation of the migrant population at sub-national levels. Public goods such as Infrastructural projects in rural and urban areas, the building of schools and hospitals, and public banking, need estimation of its usage. Infrastructure projects become really expensive when the usage is low in sparsely populated areas.
Detailed enumeration of the population and its composition at a granular level is needed for all policy implementation. Census becomes crucial for Public policy. During the Inter-Census years, policies have to rely on projections (which often is a challenge at smaller spatial units — district, city, and village level)
Epidemiology, Public Health, Health Policy: Birth history of Demography and Epidemiology are concurrent and intersecting. John Graunt, the father of Demography studied the mortality records (along with the cause of death) of London in 1606, and produced the first primitive life table. Mortality analysis now forms the core of Epidemiology and Public health. Infant and under 5 mortality rates, adult mortality rates commonly used in assessing the burden of deaths and health system in a country derive from Demographic study of mortality. The most useful indicator for the health of the nation- Life expectancy at Birth, also comes from life table analysis in Demography. The Global Burden of Disease study which assesses the deaths and disability burden of communicable, non-communicable, and injuries in an integrated manner, uses multiple decrement tables by cause of death. Mortality study by demographers is fundamental to understanding the epidemiological transition and forms the core of Public health.
Education: Any measures of education access needs enumeration of children in age groups corresponding to different education levels (kindergarten, Primary, Upper primary, elementary, secondary, higher secondary, collegiate/higher education). Measures of educational access and retention such as gross enrollment rate, net enrollment rate, dropout rate, retention rate, and repetition rate, all need population of children in the denominator at different age groups and different education levels. Granular level access needs granular-level data on the spatial distribution of the population by age. Fertility and child mortality data are needed to calculate the change in child age groups at different stages. Fertility reduction has the closest impact on the children population. School siting needs- spatial distribution of population and projecting demand for education in the neighbourhood.
Sample Survey design: Any sample survey design needs population and its distribution across villages, towns, and cities. Census data forms the sampling frame for most sample surveys of people and communities. In India, the largest Sample surveys NFHS and NSS use the Census data for sampling.
Economics
Economists draw on population series and demographic estimates, just as demographers attempt to relate fertility and mortality trends to economic series. The economy of scale depends on population density. Markets work well in places where there is a sufficiently large consumer base (which needs densely populated regions).
Economists need basic demography to sample surveys, RCT designs, and to understand the economic consequence of population change (such as fertility reduction on Child dependency ratio, Change in working age population and Demographic dividend, theconsequence of aging on labour force shortage and social security pensions).
Demographers with a background in economics have been major contributors to population theory. Economic demography is
a special field where economic analysis is used to the study of human populations and also how demography interacts with the economy. It tries to explain the causes of changes in fertility change, marriage and divorce rates, internal and international migration, changing age structure, migration flows, cycles in union formation and childbearing.
Migration studies: Migration is the fundamental force behind population change. It alters the size, distribution, and the composition of population (e.g. by sex and age). Although some treat migration as a stepchild of Demography. Migration study has evolved into a separate sub-discipline. Migration is of great interest to governments (who wants t regulate both International and Internal migrants), labour economists (study labour mobility), sociologists (cause and consequence of migration, migration by gender and social groups) and Urban Studies (primary driver or Urban growth).
Urban Studies: Urban studies has taken its own life as an inter-discipline with researchers from Geography, Demography, Planning and Design, sociology, and economics working on it. Urban fertility is usually lower than rural fertility. In many countries which have undergone a demographic transition to low fertility, migration (rural-urban or urban-urban) drives urban growth. To study urban growth, urban agglomerations (spatial continuous population in urban areas) and urbanization (relative fraction of urban population to total population) we need demography. For this spatial decomposition of the population into rural and urban, and within urban into towns, cities, and urban agglomerations is essential. The study of the spatial and temporal evolution of the city population gives insight into the development of the city, its economy and sociocultural space.
Given the ubiquitous importance of Demography in all social science disciplines, it is imperative that it should be taught as a core subject in all social science disciplines. A separate department of demography (population research centres) in Universities is essential both for the construction of the body of knowledge on population and to cater to the needs of all other social science disciplines.
In the next essay, I will outline, why we need to educate the public about demography.
End notes
- Caldwell, J. a. R. (1996). Demography and Social Science. Population Studies-a Journal of Demography, 50(3), 305–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/0032472031000149516
- J. M. Stycos, ‘Demography as an interdiscipline’, Sociological Forum, 2 (4), (1987), p. 616.)
- W. E. Moore, ‘Sociology and demography’, in Hauser and Duncan, P. M. Hauser and 0. D. Duncan (eds.), The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 32–33 ).
- R. Dahrendorf, ‘Social sciences’, in A. Kuper and J. Kuper (eds.), The Social Science Encyclopaedia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 784)
