An Integrated Framework of Population Change: Influential Factors, Spatial Dynamics, and Temporal Variation

Abstract

Population change has been studied in the fields of human ecology, population geography, environmental sociology, transportation planning, and regional economics, which make unique contributions to theorizing and modeling population change. Drawing upon this diverse literature, we develop an integrated framework for understanding population change in this review paper. The proposed framework is composed of five putative influences (demographic characteristics, socioeconomic conditions, transportation accessibility, natural amenities, and land development) analyzed across three dimensions-these influential factors of population change conditioned by spatial dynamics and temporal variation. We also proposed a practical procedure for tackling the complexity between population change and influential factors. This integrated framework has potential to complement existing population research approaches employed within individual disciplines. P opulation growth (or decline) is an important pursuit in the fields of demography, human ecology, population geography, environmental sociology, transportation planning, and regional economics. These fields adopt different theories to explain, and employ different approaches to model, population change. For example, human ecologists model population change within a holistic human-society-environment framework (Poston and Frisbie 2006). Population geographers are interested in spatial variations of population distribution, density, composition, and growth (Bailey 2005). Regional scientists and transportation planners study population via land use patterns (Boarnet 1997;Cervero 2003). Environmental planners focus on predictions of population change and

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