Разработчик модуля
Аликова Александра Сергеевна
Social Demography
Ex.1 Discuss in pairs
What do you think is the field of social demography in Russia and in the USA?
Ex.2 Read and study the following words and word combinations with their definitions
1. applied statistics – the science of using information discovered from collecting, organizing, and studying numbers that has a practical use;
2. to be bound up with – to be closely connected or involved with somebody or something;
3. a rigor of = an accuracy in;
4. exposure via = spread through;
5. core curriculum – the basic and most important part of program;
6. favourable impact – the force or action giving you an advantage or more chance of success;
7. institutional focus – the main or central point is relating to an institution;
8. to cover - to put or spread something over something;
9. delinquency - behaviour, especially of a young person, that is is illegal or not acceptable to most people;
10. to fit easily into - to be suitable for something with no difficulty or effort;
11. an introductory sociology textbook - a book that contains detailed information about the study of human societies giving you primary view to the subject;
12. path-breaking contribution to - something that you contribute or do to create something new;
13. pioneering study = path-breaking research;
14. an assessment of - the act of judging or deciding the amount, value, quality, or importance of something, or the judgment or decision that is made;
15. to emphasize - to show that something is very important or worth giving attention to;
16. labour force - all the people in a particular country who are of the right age to work, or all the people who work for a particular company;
17. to devote attention to - to give your time or effort completely to something;
18. to become more prominent relative to smth. – to start to be more well known and important in comparison with something else;
19. a faculty - a special ability to do a particular thing;
20. the doctoral alumni - men and women who have completed their studies and got the highest degree from a university;
21. to draw a precise line -to make or show an exact borderline between things;
22. to accept - to believe that something is true;
23. census - a count for official purposes, especially one to count the number of people living in a country and to collect information about them;
24. qualitative method - a particular way to find out people's opinions and feelings rather than information that can easily be shown in numbers;
25. nonetheless - despite what has just been said or done;
26. to encompass - to include different types of things;
27. childbearing pattern – an attitude to the process of having babies;
28. disparity - a lack of equality or similarity;
Ex.3 Read the text and translate it into Russian
In many countries, demography is a freestanding field or is considered to be part of a branch of applied statistics. But the history of demography in the United States is closely bound up with the discipline of sociology.
Close interactions between the breadth of the sociological vision and the rigor of demographic analysis create the potential of a symbiotic relationship. Demography is given its widest exposure via sociology. One or more courses in population are considered part of the core undergraduate curriculum in most sociology departments. In addition, having a nucleus of demographers and a leading population research center appears to favorably impact the prestige and ranking of sociology departments in the United States.
Unlike other social science disciplines, which have a primary institutional focus (e.g., economics, political science, etc.), sociology typically covers a variety of distinct areas of specialization. For example, the standard introductory sociology textbook will include chapters on marriage and the family, race and ethnic relations, crime and delinquency, rural and urban communities, formal organizations, religion, and other topics. The sociological study of population trends and patterns fits easily into this list as another topic in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum.
The status of demography in sociology was raised in the decades after World War II, when several sociologist-demographers published a series of important books and articles. Kingsley Davis, for example, wrote an introductory sociology textbook in 1949 and also published a series of important theoretical and empirical books and articles on population, social stratification, the family, and other topics in sociology. Another sociologist-demographer, Stanley Lieberson, has made a series of path-breaking contributions to the sociological study of American race and ethnic relations, research methodology, and cultural change. These sociological demographers and their pioneering studies have established the centrality of demographic training and the demographic perspective as core elements of the modern discipline of sociology.
Preston (1978) in his assessment of the future of demography in the mid-1970s noted four schools of demography, which he identified as the Princeton tradition, the Chicago-Berkeley tradition, the Pennsylvania-Brown tradition, and the Michigan-Wisconsin tradition.
· The Princeton tradition emphasized formal mathematical demography;
· The Chicago-Berkeley was the most theoretical, with an emphasis on interrelations between populations and societies;
· The Pennsylvania-Brown tradition focused on distribution and structure of labour force;
· The Michigan-Wisconsin tradition, which devoted more attention to socioeconomic status and social mobility, presented the broadest scope of the emerging field of social demography.
Preston suggested that the Michigan-Wisconsin tradition was becoming more prominent relative to the other schools. The influence of the Wisconsin and Michigan programs was due, in large part, to their productive faculty, both in terms of their published scholarship and in their training of successive generations of social demographers. The doctoral alumni of Michigan and Wisconsin have spread their vision of social demography to many other universities and colleges in the United States and abroad.
The overlap between demography and sociology has come to be known as social demography, though this term has been widely used only since the 1970s. It is often difficult to draw a precise line between demographers conducting population studies research and disciplinary researchers, for example, sociologists who happen to use demographic data.
One of the earliest references to ‘‘social demography’’ was the title of a 1963 essay by Kingsley Davis. Social Demography was also the title of a textbook published in 1970 by Ford and DeJong.
Although the term social demography has been widely accepted today, there are disputes about its field. The difficulty is that the boundaries of the field have expanded, connection between sociology and demography has deepened, and more sociologists identify their work as social demography or they draw upon (=use) demographic logic and its methods.
The field of social demography might be described as the analysis of sociological questions with demographic data, such as censuses and population surveys. However, this definition would be far too narrow, since quite a few social demographers use qualitative methods. Almost every topic in sociology has drawn the interest of some social demographers. Nonetheless, there appear to be two broad sociological themes that encompass much of social demography—the family and the study of inequality.
More than any other social institution, the family is at the heart of social demography. Among the important topics addressed by social demographers are trends in marriage and divorce, changes in age at first marriage, childbearing patterns, living arrangements, employment trends of mothers of young children, and child welfare. New topics in demographic research, including population aging and intergenerational support, have direct implications for classic sociological questions about the structure and functions of the family.
Research on socioeconomic inequality and stratification has been another field of social demography. New research directions have included comparisons of men and women in the labor force, race and ethnic identities of new immigrants, and health disparities. In addition to their familiarity with census and other national data sources, social demographers have been able to make important empirical contributions because they have developed innovative methods to study inter cohort social changes.
In the following sections, will be highlighted major themes of work that are identified with social demography.
Ex.4 Give English equivalents for the following words and word combinations:
1. Широта социологического видения
2. Расовые и этнические отношения
3. Статус демографии в социологии возрос в десятилетия после Второй мировой войны
4. Оценка будущего демографии
5. Эта традиция станет более заметной по сравнению с другими школами
6. Термин широко использовался только с 1970-х годов
7. Взаимосвязь между демографией и социологией углубилась
8. Демографическая логика и демографические методы исследования
9. Анализ социологических вопросов с использованием демографических данных
10. Изменение возраста вступления в первый брак
11. Благосостояние детей
12. Старение населения
13. Иметь непосредственное значение для…
14. Межкогортные социальные изменения
15. Внести важный эмпирический вклад в разработку инновационных методов