Teaching the Fundamentals of Demography: A Model-Based Approach to Fertility

Abstract

This chapter sketches some guidelines for teaching the fundamentals of demography, and gives concrete illustrations of their application to the demography of and fertility. The principles are based on: (a) over 40 years of experience in teaching demography; (b) some characteristics of a leading introductory physics text (Halliday, Resnick, and Walker 1997); and (c) recent work in the philosophy of science, notably by two representatives of the so-called semantic or model-based school, Ronald Giere (1988Giere ( , 1999 and Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999). 1 The focus is on demography viewed as a science, a body of valid scientific knowledge, and on providing students of all kinds with an understanding of and ability to use this knowledge for a variety of purposes. From this perspective, the collection of demographic data by means of censuses, registers, and sample surveys, although clearly important, is seen as an ancillary activity, not part of the unique core of demographic knowledge and more a matter of applied general statistics. It is what we know about how human populations work that makes demography distinctive.Much of our best knowledge of how populations work is to be found in the sub-area of formal demography, often labeled with the partly misleading term techniques. The argument here is that much of formal demography, while technical in some respects, can also be viewed as substantive (theoretical) knowledge. By the same token, in a model-based view of science, behavioral demography can be seen to contain, among other things, formal models whose structure is not fundamentally different from that of formal demographic models. The distinctions between This is a slightly edited version of a paper originally published in Genus 58 (2002) 73-90.