Demography

Demography is the study of the change in the size, density, and composition of human populations over time, and includes analysis of such factors as birth rates and death rates, as well as emigration and immigration.

"The word ‘demography’ was first used in 1855 by a Belgian, Achille Guillard, and in his terms the study included many aspects of humans including general movement and progress (including morals) in civilized countries. He used the vital statistics of birth, marriage, sickness and death from census and registration reports" (reference for quote:Thomas A Ebert, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA:Demographic Concepts in Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.) in his book, Elements de statistique humaine ou demographie comparee. Demography has come to have a wider meaning, and is now used for all statistical descriptions of human life conditions, including illnesses, socioeconomic indicators, and other aspects of living conditions - as long as the statistics refer to the numbers of individual people who exhibit the characteristic in question.

Further reading

Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population. First edition 1798; revised and edited in series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought; T. R. Malthus (Author), Donald Winch (Editor) Cambridge UP (1992)

Demographic Methods and Concepts by Donald T. Rowland (Author) 2003 Oxford UP

Academic journals specialized in demography:

Demography

Population Studies

American Demographics

Demographic Research