Demography is, broadly speaking, the social discipline that statistically studies the human population.
Different definitions of demographics
Demographics. Statistical study of a human community, referring to a certain moment or its evolution. (Royal Spanish Academy)
Demography is the science that aims to study human populations, treating, from a mainly quantitative point of view, their size, structure, evolution and general characteristics. (UN)
Demography studies those processes that determine the formation, conservation and disappearance of populations. Such processes, in their most aggregated form, are those of fertility, mortality and mobility. (Livi, p.10)
Demography is a science whose object is man considered in all aspects of his reality: as a member of a community that he enters by the mere fact of being born and from which he retires when he dies. This reality has different angles. The man object of demography is a living and complex being, that is: social, political, historical, economic and moral. In this sense it can be said that demography is an anthropological science, but not a chapter of anthropology, since it considers man collectively, not individually. (Maldonado, p.11)
The demographic analysis refers to the knowledge of the behavior of the components of the population: birth, mortality and migration, as well as their changes and consequences; to the factors that determine the changes and to the period of time required for those changes to occur. Population studies deal with the relationships that exist between population changes and other types of social, economic, political, biological, genetic, and geographic variables. (Valdés, p.75)
In the following series of video-lessons, Professor Javier Morales, from the Miguel Hernández University of Elche, makes an introduction to the vast subject of demography, presenting a definition, the factors of demographic dynamics, data sources and some tools such as Lexis diagrams and population studies, among other topics. (5 videos, 1 hour and 24 minutes)
What is population?
Commonly the word population is used to designate the set of inhabitants of a given territory, as well as to designate a part of said population (eg, school-age population, marriage-age population), although in this case it is more appropriate to speak of subpopulation. Often we speak of population not to indicate the whole itself but the number of inhabitants that compose it. (UN)
By population is understood a set of individuals, constituted in a stable way, linked by reproductive links and identified by territorial, political, legal, ethnic or religious characteristics. The meaning of population is quite elastic; This concept encompasses both small groups of a few hundred people isolated for geographical, religious reasons, etc., which despite their small size manage to ensure their own reproduction and survival, as well as large nations with several hundred million inhabitants. (Livi, pp. 9 and 10)
What are the basic elements of demographics?
- Those that are based on registration. Population censuses and demographic surveys. Those that are based on records. Administrative records and vital statistics.
Types and disciplines
Lara and Mateos (p.262) list the following types of demographics:
- Static demographics. Study of the absolute number of individuals that make up a given population, divided into categories according to their status, age, sex, profession, intellectual conditions, etc., and the relationships that exist between the various categories. Dynamic demographics. It studies the internal movements that come from birth and mortality, and the external ones that have their origin in immigration and emigration. General demographics. Deduce from the above data the laws or principles that the population obeys and their variations.
Likewise, it identifies the following disciplines within the field of action of demography:
- Descriptive demography. It deals with the volume, geographical distribution, structure and development of human populations, relying mainly on demographic statistics, which is the application of general statistics to the study of human populations. Theoretical demography. Also called pure demography, it considers populations from a general and abstract point of view, studying the formal relationships between different demographic phenomena. Quantitative demography. It is called this way because of the importance attributed to the numerical aspect of the phenomena and to distinguish it from the branches that are expressed below. Economic demographics. It is the branch that deals with populations in relation to economic phenomena.Social demography. It is the part that refers to social phenomena.
Demographics and Marketing
The demographic environment is one of the variables that affects the marketing macroenvironment, being considered of great importance since it studies the population that makes up the markets. The demographic trends and events are analyzed by the firms to foresee possible future market and consumption behavior and to understand the causes of past marketing actions.
For example, a variation in the age structure in the population that constitutes a market can completely change the life cycle of the product, forcing companies to keep their research and development departments active in such a way that consumers are always satisfied.
Demography also intervenes in the market segmentation process, since through it the characteristics of a certain market are established in terms of age, sex, race, location and others for which the analysis and demographic studies are in charge.
Demographics and macroeconomics
Economic demography is a fundamental piece of macroeconomic analysis since through it the behaviors and characteristics of populations are evidenced both transversely (on specific dates) and longitudinally (over time).
References
- Lara and Mateos, Rosa María. Medicine and culture, Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1994.Livi Bacci, Massimo. Introduction to demography, Editorial Ariel, 1993, p. Maldonado Cruz, Pedro. Demography: Fundamental Concepts and Techniques, Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2006. UN, Multilingual Demographic Dictionary Royal Spanish Academy, Dictionary of the Spanish Language Valdés, Luz María. Challenge population of the third millennium, UNAM, 2000.
