Sociology and Demography: The Roles, Connections, and Purposes of Sciences

Abstract

The article deals with a long-standing, almost unknown to the modern generation of Ukrainian sociologists, discussion of the role and relationship of sociology and demography in population studies as well as about why the tradition to name science, which, in fact, studies people as a social subsystem, ”demography”, and the processes in the population, their patterns and social policy to regulate them — "demographic". The problem is that the term “demography” (gr. dēmos – “the people', graphy –“writing, description or measurement”) at one time originated and established itself as the name of population statistics, because it has as its subject the description of quantitative characteristics of the population, while the science which subject is qualitative analysis of the population, there is sociology. In the West, the sociological nature of science, which studies the patterns of population functioning, is generally accepted. This is evidenced by the fact that in the United States the vast majority of specialists in population problems being trained in the specialty "sociology of population" in dozens of departments of sociology. On the other hand, on our territory the sociology of population is almost not developing which, in particular, is evidenced by the fact that we do not train specialists in this area at all. This is the result of a long-standing campaign during which the opinion was imposed on Soviet scientists that the science, the subject of which is a comprehensive study of population, is demography, and that the latter cannot have a sociological nature, since sociology has a completely different subject. In this article based on the analysis of the actions motivation of the famous Soviet statistician, demographer and sociologist B. Urlanis, the initiator of the named campaign, it is shown that its real reason was the need to protect the sociology from the real threat of curtailing the study of population in the 60s of the XX century, when sociology which had just started to revive in the USSR after a long ban, could fall along with all its branches under a new prohibition. In the context of the growth of the population crisis in Ukraine and the institutional non-recognition of the science of population as a field of sociology, the lack of training of specialists in the sociology of population only contributes to the deepening of this crisis.