Elements of thinking like a demographer.





1.  Populations are real.  Or, at least, population is the central concept of demography.



2.  The goal of demographic investigation is to count rather than to measure.



3.  The core concept is the notion of a rate; i.e., the number of events divided by the exposure to the event.



4.  Demographic analysis is, at root, a process of decomposition of a number, a rate, etc. into differences in "group" specific rates and differences in numbers of individuals in the groups.



5.  You can have a demography of lots of things, not just human populations.  E.g., organizations, animals, etc.



6.  Demography is usually dynamic.  That is, rates are time dependent.



7.  Demography has both a micro and a macro aspect.  Neither is very fruitful without the other.  Demography is the science of creative aggregation.  That is, how do microlevel processes, carefully specified, aggregate to explain macrolevel variation?



8.  Demography can stand alone, but this is usually bloodless.  Demography is best treated as the handmaiden of economics, sociology, epidemiology, etc.  For social science, the goal is to examine the interdependence of population dynamics and social (economic, etc.) processes.