Handbook of Population [Paperback]

This comprehensive handbook provides an overview and update of the issues, theories, processes, and applications of the social science of population studies. The volume's 30 chapters cover the full range of conceptual, empirical, disciplinary, and applied approaches to the study of demographic phenomena. This book is the first effort to assess the entire field since Hauser and Duncan's 1959 classic, The Study of Population. The chapter authors are among the leading contributors to demographic scholarship over the past four decades. They represent a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives as well as interests in both basic and applied research.

This is the most comprehensive reference collection on population in the last 40 years. It represents the first effort to assess the entire field. The chapter authors are among the leading contributors to demographic scholarship over the past four decades.

Completion of this Handbook would not have been possible without the generous and dedicated assistance of numerous people. Several years ago Howard Kaplan, Editor of the Kluwer/Plenum Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, asked Dudley Poston to edit a Handbook of Population. Poston then asked his long-time collaborator and fellow demographer, Michael Micklin, to join him as co-editor. Poston and Micklin next assembled a list of chapter topics and possible authors. We endeavored to shape the contributions to the Handbook in two ways: We wished to parallel in many ways the outline of The Study of Population, edited by Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan, and published in 1959. The Hauser and Duncan volume was the key comp- dium and inventory of the state of demography; one had not been published since. In shaping this Handbook we also took into account the increased scope of demography, its development in other social science areas, and its application outside the academy. In the subsequent development of this HandbooklÓ