Chapter 28

The science of demography focuses on the drivers of population dynamics: fertility, mortality, and migration. Demography is inherently interdisciplinary and draws on theory from a range of social sciences, including sociology, economics, and anthropology. The demographers’ approach to fertility research at a given time is grounded in the contemporaneous fertility trends and fertility-related technology at the societal and individual levels. For example, the founding of demography at the turn of the twentieth century coincided with declining fertility levels among the most affluent and educated families, a bimodal pattern of high fertility or childlessness among families at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, and Margaret Sanger’s public health efforts to support the availability of contraception. Thus, demography was originally deeply concerned with fertility control as defined by the ability to stop having children after reaching the desired family size. As US fertility patterns settled into nearly universal parenthood with most families having two to four children in the 1950s, demographers turned their attention to “uncontrolled” fertility in the developing countries of Asia and Africa. The most consuming fertility issues of the 1970s reflected the technological development of the contraceptive pill and the social development of increasingly nonlegitimated teen births.