Three to five main challenges to demographic research

Abstract

A presidential address is poor occasion for changing one's ways, and inveterate compromisers compromise. So that, unable to choose among single integrated topics, I have decided to consider a topic per component of population change, much in the order in which my own work has evolved. Mortality heads the list, as befits pride of place to one's research first born; fertility will come third. Internal migration will come between, at some underserved risk of being squeezed. So much for the Three of my title. The Five reflects my intention to deal with issues involving basic methodology. These could have been as usefully integrated with each substantive topic as considered separately; the numerical distinction is to draw attention to the small importance of taxonomic precision in such matters. The challenges to be singled out are mainly macrodemographic in content, quantitatively oriented, and of major interest for policy. As one whose student ways of counting degrees of freedom was more by countries than by household, I should perhaps add that my macrodemographic emphasis here is not intended to take sides concerning the relative importance of macro versus micro main issues. Indeed, I believe and argue below that one of our discipline's main unmet challenges is to evolve improved means of accommodating macro and micro approaches to each other. We are far from the stage where adequate bridges exist between microlevel indications and macrolevel uses-a shortcoming by no means limited to demography. This said, I would stress nonetheless that macrodemographic issues and variables must continue to be foremost and uniquely oriented parts of our research endeavor-a point quite obvious in principle but easily obscured by our growing reliance on household-level data sources and models. Certainly, today's research opportunities and needs for entire-population analysis are far greater than ever before. International differences in expectation of life at birth are at historically high orders of magnitude-35 years or more-with unprecedented convergence among the developed countries (DCs), equally unprecedented disparities in the less developed countries (LDCs), and vast consequent interregional variations in causes of death, quality of life, and socioeconomic arrangements. Fertility ranges from as yet unyieldingly high premodern levels, such as in Black Africa, to the apparently entrenched subreplacement patterns now frequent or even modal in high-income societies. As a result, national age distributions differ enormously, from the traditional youngage patterns of pretransition or earlytransition populations to the accelerated aging trends found in large parts of the West. LDC-DC differences in urban growth and global urbanization processes continue at peak orders of magnitude, fueled in large measure by apparently record amounts of rural-to-urban migration movements. Rural population in the *Presented as the Presidential Address at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 15, 1983.

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