Emily Merchant, UC Davis - "U. S. Demography in Transition"
Abstract: At the end of the 1970s, American demographers faced a crisis: population control had lost its moral legitimacy, and private sources of research funding were drying up. This paper examines how demography as a field responded to the crisis, using structural topic modeling to analyze oral history interviews spanning nearly forty years. It finds that demographers tapped a new source of funding, the National Institutes of Health, shifting their research focus to health disparities in the United States, and converted the Population Association of America from an interest group for people concerned with population growth to a professional organization for demographers.
*Please do not share, cite, or quote from the attached manuscript, which is currently under review
Date
-