Research > Research Themes > Innovations in Methods > Demographic methods

The PSC has long been a leader in formal demography. Preston is the lead author of the field’s canonical methodological text, and received the Sheps Award from the PAA (among a legion of other honors) for original demographic work, including “variable-r,” the path-breaking extension of stable population methods to non-stable populations. Ewbank’s breakthrough work on the demography of genetic heterogeneity has already been noted. Kohler, in Demography and elsewhere, has made original contributions to the calculation of period total fertility rates with adjustment for fertility tempo within constituent cohorts. One of the most fundamental contributions of demography to population and health studies is a framework for assessing data quality. Elo’s contributions in this area have made her Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NCHS, and include work with Preston on the black-white mortality crossover and a recent paper in Population and Development Review in which they document inaccuracies in official life tables for African-Americans (so that the government is now reissuing these tables). Smith’s work translating cohort projection models into vector-autoregressive functions is at the frontier of the traditional divide between deterministic demographic methods and stochastic statistical methods. This group is crucial to maintaining the NICHD (Smith) and NIA (Soldo) T32 training programs, hence the Graduate Group in Demography (GGD, Madden). These training programs are crucial to the PSC. They attract core faculty with an interest in graduate training in demography and, in turn, the success of our graduate training program—it is as highly ranked as any at Penn—give the PSC call within SAS on faculty positions. These training programs and their students are also an attraction to PSC program scientists outside the GGD (Katz, J Culhane, Chang, Mandell), as demographic methods carry over well to other fields.