Sunday, May 20, 2018

family microsimulation in demography

The study of the family has had a long and distinguished history in the demographic research tradition.[Family Demography, Ed by J Bongaarts, etc] A central preoccupation of this early work was the development of methods to obtain information about family structures from basic demographic characteristics of populations. As a result of this work, we learned to adapt classic life table methods and stable population equations to estimate key measures of kinship.

More recently, improvements in computational power have allowed for more sophisticated microsimulation-based techniques that enable the modeling of demographic behaviors at the individual level. These techniques generate kinship projections at finer resolutions and often with great fidelity to empirical fact. In this post, I [Paul Chung] present a brief introduction to the theoretical relationship between demography and the family and demonstrate how a microsimulation strategy can help us bridge the analytic gap between the two.

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