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2.8: Demography

  • Page ID
    308797
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    Finally, the U.S. family today has an important underpinning that influences the family in the larger social and personal levels. Demography is the scientific study of population growth and change. Everything in society influences demography and demography conversely influences everything in society. After World War II, the United States began to recover from the long-term negative effects of the war. Families had been separated, relatives had died or were injured, and women who had gone to the factories then returned home at war's end. The year 1946 reflected the impact of that upheaval in its very atypical demographic statistics. Starting in 1946 people married younger, had more children per woman, divorced and remarried, and kept having one child after another. From 1946 to 1956 the birth rate rose and peaked, then began to decline again. By 1964 the national high birth rate was finally back to the level it was at before 1946. All those children born from 1946-1964 were called the Baby Boom Generation (there are about 78 million of them alive today). Why was there such a change in familyrelated rates? The millions of deaths caused by the war, the long-term separation of family members from one another, and the deep shifts toward conservative values all contributed. The Baby Boom had landed and after the Baby Boom Generation was in place, it conversely affected personal and larger social levels of society in every conceivable way.

    The Baby Boomers are most likely your parents or grandparents. Their societal influence on the family changed the U.S. forever. The earliest cohort of Baby Boomers (1946-51) has the world record for highest divorce rates. Collectively Baby Boomers are still divorcing more than their parents ever divorced. They had their own children and many of you belong to Generations X or Y (X born 1965-1984 and \(Y\) born 1985-present). There are many of you because there were many Baby Boomers. The demographic processes of this country include these Baby Boomers, their legacy, and their offspring. To understand the U.S. family, you must understand the Baby Boomers and underlying demographic forces.

    The core of demographic studies has three component concerns: births, deaths, and migration. All of demography can be reduced to this very simple formula:

    (Births-Deaths) +/- ((In-Migration)-(Out Migration)) = Population Change.

    This part of the formula, (Births-Deaths) is called natural increase, which is all births minus all deaths in a given population over a given time period. The other part of the formula, ((In-Migration)-(Out Migration)) is called net migration, which is all in-migration minus all out-migration in a given population over a given time period.

    The Industrial Revolution set into motion a surge of births and a lowering of deaths which changed U.S. society and families forever.


    2.8: Demography is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.