The structure of demographic action

Abstract

Recent work on a variety of demographic topics?fertility, marriage, divorce, migration, moving?shows a strong tendency toward the use of models of individual or small group decision making. These models derive from a numberof different disciplinary traditions, and differ in emphasis, style, and at some crucial points in substantive assumptions. Some synthesis of these disparate models, across dis ciplines and across topics, and their integration with the rich fund of demographic empirical generalizations at the aggregate level, should vastly improve the structure of demography as a science. It is a measure of the growing scientific maturity of demo graphy that Vance's question of twenty-seven years ago?"Is Theory for Demographers?"?now seems almost quaint (Vance, 1952). As a science, demography needs theory as well as data, and indeed has always had theory, if only implicitly. But maturity means openness about one's acts and intentions. And what characterizes demography today, in contrast to then, is an increasingly open, unapologetic approach to theory. At the same time, demography has shifted from an almost exclusive focus on the behavior of large population aggregates to concern with the behavior of individuals and small groups. Discussions of individual behavior that remained implicit or ad hoc in earlier works are now more explicit and systematic.