TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bijak, Jakub
A1  - Silverman, Eric
A1  - Courgeau, Daniel
A1  - Franck, Robert
T1  - Quantifying paradigm change in demography
Y1  - 2014/03/25
JF  - Demographic Research
JO  - Demographic Research
SN  - 1435-9871
SP  - 911
EP  - 924
DO  - 10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32
VL  - 30
IS  - 32
UR  - https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/
L1  - https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/30-32.pdf
L2  - https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/30-32.pdf
L3  - https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/files/readme.30-32.txt
L3  - https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/files/demographic-research.30-32.zip
N2  - Background: Demography is a uniquely empirical research area amongst the social sciences. We posit that the same principle of empiricism should be applied to studies of the population sciences as a discipline, contributing to greater self-awareness amongst its practitioners. 

Objective: The paper aims to include measurable data in the study of changes in selected demographic paradigms and perspectives. 

Methods: The presented analysis is descriptive and is based on a series of simple measures obtained from the free online tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, which includes frequencies of word groupings (n-grams) in different collections of books digitised by Google. 

Results: The tentative findings corroborate the shifts in the demographic paradigms identified in the literature -- from cross-sectional, through longitudinal, to event-history and multilevel approaches. 

Conclusions: These findings identify a promising area of enquiry into the development of demography as a social science discipline. We postulate that more detailed enquiries in this area in the future could lead to establishing History of Population Thought as a new sub-discipline within population sciences. 

ER  -