Penn State Population Research Institute | Population
Specialty Group
NEWSLETTER
POPULATION SPECIALTY GROUP
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS
Population Specialty Group, is running for one of the AAG's National Councillors positions. Most of the readers of this newsletter are familiar with Curt's work in migration and his current interest in ethnic studies. He has published in virtually all of the major American geography journals, including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Economic Geography, Urban Geography, and Growth and Change. He has long been one of the strongest driving forces supporting PSG and he deserves our votes. Please consider voting in support of Curt's candidacy. Official ballots are available in the December issue of the AAG Newsletter (page 21). Your vote is due no later than March 1, 1998.
Janet Franklin and Stuart Aitken were recently
awarded the editorship of The Professional Geographer. They hope
to continue to use focus sections – groups of related articles – as one
mechanism for encouraging timely, high-quality submissions to the journal,
especially in (but not limited to) topic areas previously underrepresented
in the journal. Focus sections can be constructed by the Editors from a
group of unsolicited manuscripts on a related topic, or can result from
manuscripts submitted as a group.
Janet and Stuart invite members of PSG to
consider organizing a focus section. For example, if you are organizing
a special session or symposium at the next years' AAG meeting, or another
professional meeting, you might be interested in coordinating a group of
contributing authors for a focus session.
It is important to note that all manuscripts
go through a peer review process, so there is no guarantee that papers
that receive unfavorable reviews will be accepted for publication.
For further information please contact:
The Urban Institute is undertaking the most extensive and important project in its 29-year history. Called "Assessing the New Federalism (ANF)," this multi-year project monitors, analyzes, and reports on the nation's far-reaching experiment in decentralizing welfare programs from federal support to state and local jurisdictions. ANF is examining changes to the social safety net in all 50 states. The research team is analyzing the design, administration, funding, and implementation of the major federal-state health, income security, social service, and job training programs. Collaborating with Child Trends, one of the country's leading authorities on measuring children's well-being, the project is also tracking how children and families fare and, where possible, relating family outcomes to programmatic reform. In addition to researching national trends, the project team is closely monitoring 13 states through site visits and household surveys. Policy and budgetary changes to social programs in these 13 states will be analyzed along with innovations in service delivery and the well-being of their citizens. The goal is to help inform the public debate over reforming the nation's social programs and will help policymakers and service providers effectively carry out their new responsibilities.
The first three years of the program are being supported by $30 million provided by a number of funding organizations (e.g. the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and many others).
The ANF research team is employing three data collection strategies to monitor the decentralization of welfare aid and its accompanying program changes. The first is the creation of a state database that incorporates collecting data for all 50 states in such broad areas as: income security, health, well-being, state fiscal and political conditions, demographic characteristics and social services. Some historical information from the late 1980s and early 1990s is included, but the database concentrates on measures from 1993 onward. Some of these data are already available for all 50 U.S. states.
The second data collection strategy focuses on the development and implementation of policies in 13 states selected for intensive study (Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin). Data for Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Texas are now available.
The third strategy includes a National Survey of America's Families that will be one of the largest and most comprehensive survey on the well-being of adults and children. About 48,000 people participated in this survey that was undertaken in 1997 and its results are expected to become available to the general public in 1998. For further information regarding this research venture call (202) 828-1815 or check the Urban Institute's World Wide Web site.
For sure, these are exciting times for geography in North America. We must all be keenly aware of the vigorous theoretical debates that seem to encompass much of the discipline, and no doubt we all think about how these debates speak to our own research and teaching efforts. But some questions raised by audience members at a couple of the recent PSG plenary sessions, and letters to the editor of this publication, give me -and maybe others - some pause. Where do we, as PSG members, fit? What are our common interests and strengths? Have these changed at all in light of the re-assessment of the basis of knowledge that many of our colleagues discuss? Do others in the academy look to the PSG as a site of experimentation, fermentation, and chic radicalism? Or does our pedagogy predispose us to another "niche" in the academic division of labor? Or, is there anything communal about our enterprise at all? Rather, is the PSG a sum of the works of its members? In short, who are we?
At the risk of privileging the quantitative,
what follows is one take on how the interests and expertise of PSG members
have changed over the recent past of 1992-1997. Due paying PSG members
may also elect to co-membership in up to five other AAG specialty groups.
Table 1 compares the top ten specialty groups chosen by PSG members in
1992 (the first year AAG retained information), and the most recent year,
1997. These data at least provide us with an anecdotal sense of who
we are becoming.
It turns out that half of our membership also belongs
to one of two other specialty groups: Urban or GIS. Right now, one
in three members of PSG is also an Urban SG member. Both the absolute
and relative numbers of Urban and GIS co-membership continues to grow.
Clearly, we have a core, and this core remains quite stable, as might be
expected over the relatively short time span of 1992-1997. But, there
do appear to be some changes, in at least two areas. The number of
members who elected MMQM (Math Models), Microcomputer, and Cartography
declined, with the latter two falling out of 1997s Top Ten list.
Co-membership with Latin America also fell off. By contrast, the
largest gains were GPOW (Geographic Perspectives on Women, which increased
from 12 to 33 members), RDP (Regional Development and Planning, up from
29 to 43, and into third rank), Medical (up from 23 to 33), and Political
(up from 24 to 30). This suggests that PSG member interests and expertise
are indeed moving with broader disciplinary trends. Perhaps it is
the case that this is emblematic of the attention in geography and demography
paid to social theory. Past-past co-presidents Hazel Morrow-Jones
and John Watkins wrote in this column that we might want to entertain the
idea of a mid-life crisis. With an increasing share of our members
interested in feminist scholarship, and familiar with cultural critiques
of urban, political, and medical fields, there would appear to be plenty
of grist for the (collective) mill. Perhaps young scholars in population
geography will lead the way here?
It does seem that this apparent trend of an intensifying urban/GIS core and shifting periphery will oblige us to think through issues of methodology in particular. Feminist scholarship calls into question many assumptions that those of us with quantitative tendencies hold dear. To ignore this discussion impoverishes the kind of (collective) contributions that population geographers really could and should be making by virtue of their traditional embrace of methodology. Certainly, this is not the first time this issue has been raised (scan a few of the presidents' columns in this newsletter), nor is this rendition especially eloquent (Kevin McHugh has a great manuscript on this topic), but my hope is that we will more aggressively discuss these issues. Panel session anyone?
Note: This article was written by PSG President Adrian Bailey (Department of Geography, Dartmouth College).
The International Geographical Union's Commission on Population Geography and the Environment is soliciting papers and abstracts for its next conference to be held in Dundee, Scotland during the three-day period of August 26-28, 1998.
In 1991 Professor Daniel Noin (University of Paris 1) edited a publication commissioned by the IGU Commission on Population Geography entitled: "Where is Population Geography going?" Contributions by 18 international contributors showed the diversity of population geography, but they also indicated the considerable methodological and philosophical challenges facing the subdiscipline. Some of the authors questioned whether population geography could respond both to the new methodological challenges (e.g. larger and more complex demographic data sets, more sophisticated GIS options for integrating population and other spatially referenced data, more powerful computing systems for mapping and modeling population trends) and to the philosophical issues raised by postmodernism (such as the questioning of conventional categories used by population geographers in relations to age, sex, and race, and the scepticism over attempts to build general models of migration, fertility, and mortality). The past six years have, however, shown that population geographers have responded very vigorously to these new challenges. The methodological and philosophical diversity of the subdiscipline may now be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. The purpose of the 1998 conference is, therefore, to reflect on the exciting new models, methods, and theories which have been taken up in population geography over recent years and to evaluate the health of population geography at the end of this century.
Following a plenary session when some of the
contributors to Noin's book will be asked to reflect on how their perspective
has changed during the 1990s, the conference will be organized around the
following three themes:
1. Population Geography: Theoretical Perspectives at the End
of the 20th Century
a. Methods for interconnecting the local and the global in population
geography.
b. theoretical perspectives on global population issues
c. interdisciplinary perspectives on (a) population and the
environment, (b) population and society, and (c) population and economy.
d. practicing post-structuralist population geography
e. gender perspectives on population issues
f. critical cultural population geographies
g. the future of "models" in population research
2. Quantitative Methods and Progress in Population Geography
a. Applications of GIS in population research
population projections for
the 21st century
modeling specific population
groups (e.g. the elderly, single person households, dual career households,
etc.)
mixing quantitative and
qualitative methods in researching fertility, mortality, and migration
advances in population geography
3. Exploration of Qualitative Methods in Population Research
ethnographic studies, investigating narrative identities,
and biographical/auto- biographical accounts
literature and other sources for qualitative analysis
of population
the politics of position in population research,
representing the other in population geography
Note: This article was written by Allan M. Findlay, Centre for Applied Population Research, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK (Fax: 01282-344434; e-mail: a.m.findlay@dundee.ac.uk).
A symposium entitled "Population, Health, and the Environment" was organized by the Commission on Population and the Environment, IGU with the participation of the IGU Commission on Health, Environment, and Development. The conference was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand (in northwest corner of the country) during the period of January 7-11, 1997.
More than 70 participants from 18 countries participated through 38 presentations. Many of the participants came from southern and eastern Asia, geographers who seldom take part in other world conferences because of lack of travel funds. The symposium was supported by the IGU Commission on Population and the Environment, Chiang Mai University, The Ford Foundations, The National Research Council of Thailand, and the United Nations Population Fund.
The conference was organized around four general
issues: (1) the geographical inequalities of health, (2) health and gender,
(3) health and the environment, and (4) population, development, and health.
Later a special volume will be published containing selected papers presented
during the symposium.
For more information contact: Allan M. Findlay, Centre for Applied
Population Research, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK
(Fax: 01282-344434; e-mail: a.m.findlay@dundee.ac.uk).
The May 1997 poll conducted by Princeton University asked questions of native and long-time resident Americans about their perceptions of various immigrant groups living in the United States. It found that 35% of the people sampled had a negative opinion of Cuban Americans, the lowest approval rating of any of the immigrant groups covered. About 18% viewed Cubans favorably, 23% were neutral in their opinions of Cubans, and the remainder (24%) said they were not familiar with Cubans.
In addition to Cubans, the poll found that the three other groups that had the highest disapproval ratings were Mexicans (34%), Middle Easterners (30%), and people from the Caribbean islands (29%). The groups receiving the highest approval ratings were Europeans, Japanese, Africans, and Chinese.
The results of the survey suggest that the negative attitudes toward Cubans are strongly linked to media portrayals of uncontrolled immigration and criminal behavior. Other factors that might be associated with the low ratings of Cuban Americans are disapproval of government aid to immigrants, fear of job competition, and discomfort with Spanish. (R.A. Zaldivar, "Immigrants from Cuba Facing Image Problem, Poll Shows," The Miami Herald, June 16, 1997, p. 1A.)
The University of Georgia hosted a roundtable
entitled "Migration and Restructuring in the U.S.: Towards the Next Millennium"
on May 2-4, 1997. The meeting was organized by Kavita Pandit and
Suzanne Davies Withers and co-sponsored by the Department of Geography
and the Institute of Behavioral Research. Additional funding was
provided by a University of Georgia State-of-the-Art Conference Award.
The roundtable addressed the interrelationships between economic,
social, and demographic restructuring underway in the U.S. and current
and emerging patterns of internal and international migration. Papers
were presented by 23 leading North American geographers, demographers,
and economists engaged in migration research, and were organized into five
sessions: "Migration and Labor Market Restructuring," "Migration and Social
and Economic Restructuring," "Demographic and Ethnic Dimensions of Migration,"
"Immigration and Internal Migration Dynamics," and "Emerging Trends and
Policy Issues in Migration Research." Plans are underway to publish
the conference papers in an edited volume.
Note: This article was written by Kavita Pandit(University of Georgia).
On February 27, the British Society for Population Studies (BSPS) and the London Research Center (LRC) held a joint meeting in London entitled "International Migration Data – Sources and Uses." About 60 people attended the meeting, with about a third coming from local government agencies, a third from central government offices, and the final third from academic centers, universities, and voluntary organizations.
The purpose of the meeting was to clarify what data on international migration exist, how the data are used by the central government in making its population estimates and projections, and what data can be accessed by other researchers. Five speakers gave presentations with a question session following each. (Marian Storkey, "BSPS/LRC International Migration Data Meeting," British Society for Population Studies Newsletter," Issue No. 53, May 1997. E-mail: ld1@socsci.soton.ac.uk)
The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) announces the release of its new 4th edition of its Population Handbook. It contains 11 chapters explaining basic population concepts, and it provides examples of population statistics, explains how they are calculated, and how they should be interpreted. It also includes World Wide Web addresses for national and international sources of information on population, and up-to-date information on a variety of American population topics. It costs $10.00 plus $1.50 for shipping.
Forty years ago, the countries of East Asia, already among the most densely populated in the world, were experiencing rapid population growth. They had limited natural resources and low standards of living. Few observers were optimistic about their development prospects.
Since then, several East Asian countries have achieved extraordinary economic success. Economic growth over the past three decades in countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have been discussed widely as models for developing countries to emulate.
A recent study conducted by staff of the East-West Center in Hawaii has determined that the slower population growth rates of these countries have played an important role in this recent history of economic success. The study concentrated on 6 Asian countries: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. It found that women in East Asia have reduced their childbearing at a remarkable speed, from an average of 6 children or more to 2 children or fewer in the space of one generation. The transition from high to low fertility took only 22 years in Singapore. In Japan and South Korea it occurred in 24 years; whereas in Taiwan and Thailand it took 26 years and 28 years, respectively.
The rapid decline in fertility in these 6 countries spurred economic growth in at least 3 ways: (a) by expanding the size of the labor force through increasing female labor force participation rates, (b) allowing for improvements in education, and (c) through higher rates of saving and investment. However, the study also notes that an accelerated demographic transition by itself is not sufficient to produce economic miracles. Favorable demographic conditions create opportunities for economic growth that must be recognized and exploited by appropriate government policies.
For more information about this study contact:
The East-West Center will hold its next (29th) Summer Seminar on Population in Honolulu between May 28 and June 27, 1998. Four workshops will be included: (a) "Researching Sensitive Issues in Sexuality and Reproductive Health," (b) "Getting the Most Out of the 2000 round Census Results," (c) "Communicating Population and Health Research to Policymakers," and (d) "Health-Care Financing." For more information contact the address listed in the article immediately before this one, or e-mail a message requesting information to the following address: sumsem98@ewc.hawaii.edu.
A new 52-page Population Bulletin released by the Population Reference Bureau entitled "Infectious Diseases-New and Ancient Threats to World Health," evaluates the risks to world health from old and new diseases. The eradication of smallpox in the 1970s led many demographers and members of the medical profession to believe that IPDs (which include such diseases as malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera, as well as more exotic ones like dengue fever, Ebola, and Chagas' disease) would soon be completely eradicated. Developments since then have shattered that belief.
The study finds that IPDs are not disappearing. The HIV/AIDS epidemic alerted health officials to the fact that IPDs have been on the rise for the past quarter–century. Old diseases are appearing with increasing frequency, new forms of old diseases that resist treatment are appearing in increasing numbers, and new diseases rarely or never before experienced by humans are surfacing.
More than 28 new disease-causing microbes have been identified since 1973. These include a new strain of cholera that has killed thousands of people in Africa and Asia and new forms of tuberculosis and meningitis that are resistant to most known antibiotics. More than 17 million people died from these diseases in 1995 – accounting for more than one-fourth of all deaths. About 97% of the deaths from these diseases occur in low-income countries.
IPDs are occurring increasingly in developed countries as well as in the less developed countries. IPDs today can travel in a matter of hours to any part of the glove, thanks to modern air travel. In the United States alone, the annual cost of IPDs is estimated to be about $120 billion. The U.S. records 600,000 cases of pneumonia each year, resulting in 25,000 to 50,000 deaths, and between 10,000 and 40,000 deaths due to influenza. HIV/AIDS has slowed sub-Saharan Africa's population growth and may dramatically reduce the life expectancy in some African countries.
The PRB study determined that 6 major natural and human actions have influenced the increase in IPDs:
In 1997, the developing countries accounted for 98% of the world's population increase. The current prospect is for that imbalance to continue. About 81% of the world's population lives in developing countries and by 2025 this proportion is expected to increase to 85%. Since 1900, when the count was 1.6 billion, the world's population has increased fourfold to 5.8 billion in 1997. This information comes from the 1997 World Population Data Sheet produced by the Population Reference Bureau.
You can use the U.S. Census Bureau's Web site to obtain county data from its County Business Patternspublications. These data are easily accessed by using the Bureau's "Map Stats" routine.
"Map Stats" starts with a U.S. map. You click on a state, then on a county, and select the database you want to use – choosing from the 1990 Population Census, the 1993 and 1994 County Business Patternsseries or the 1994 and 1996 USA Counties file.
County Business Patterns gives you the number of establishments, the number of employees, the establishments in nine employment-size classes for each industry in the selected county. (Census and You,Vol. 32, No. 4, April 1997, p. 4.)
In 1980, for the first time, women undergrads outnumbered men; they have continued to outnumber the men in the 1990s. The picture, however, changes in graduate school. Men outnumbered women until the middle 1980s. In the 1990s, the number was about equal among students under 35 years of age.
For more information see the following Website: www.census.gov/population/socdemo/school/tablea- 7txt or contact: Rosalind Bruno at (301) 457-2464. (Census and You, Vol. 32, No. 4, April 1997, p. 6.)
The Census Bureau plans to use 6 population questions and 1 housing question of the short-form questionnaire for the 2000 Census, making it the shortest form to be used by the U.S. Census in 180 years. In addition, another 27 questions will be covered on the long-form questionnaire, which will be sent to one out of every six households. In all, 34 questions will be included on the long form, since it also will include the 7 questions from the short-form. There are 5 questions that were included on the 1990 Census questionnaire that will be missing on the one for 2000. The questions missing from the 2000 questionnaire are: (a) children ever born, (b) year last worked, (c) source of water, (d) sewage disposal used, and (e) condominium status. (Census and You, Vol. 32, No. 6, June 1997, p. 3.)
Russia, the world's largest country, has another unique distinction: 1 million more people died than were born there in 1996. Although a handful of other nations had more deaths than births, none had anywhere close to that many more. The large gap is due to both declining fertility and rising mortality. Increasing mortality dropped Russian life expectancy from a post-World War II high of 69.2 years in the mid-1980s to 63.8 in 1994, the lowest during the postwar era. Among Russian men the decline was even sharper, from 63.4 years in 1990 to 56.5 years in 1995. The 1995 figure for Russian men was lower than it is for some Third World countries, such as Kenya and Brazil. For more information contact Ward Kingkade, (301) 457-1362 or e-mail: w.w.kingkade@ccmail.census.gov. ("Russia: Death Far More Common than Birth," Census and You, Vol. 32, No. 7, July 1997, p. 5.)
(The following item is an abbreviated version of a paper published in
Issues (No. 37, October 1996, pp. 47-53), a journal published by
the Australian Council for Educational Research. The aim of the paper was
to give readers (principally high school and tertiary educators) a brief
introduction to the growing array of population resources available on
the World Wide Web (WWW) part of the Internet. Kevin McCracken (Macquarie
University in Sydney, Australia) was invited by the Editor of the PSG newsletter
to write this piece because of its particular importance for persons conducting
population research.)
Population Resource Guides:
A major problem for new users of the Web is
finding their way through the ever exploding amount of material being put
up on it. A useful and efficient way of starting off looking for population
materials is to use one or more of the subject resource guides that have
been compiled. Probably the most wide-ranging of these is the World Wide
Web Virtual Library - Demography and Population Studies catalogue. Two
other useful population-related catalogues in the WWW Virtual Library series
are Epidemiology
and Migration and Ethnic Relations.
Assorted population materials are also found in some of the other catalogues
(e.g. AIDS, Asian Studies, Indigenous Studies, International Development,
Medicine). A listing of all subject catalogues in the WWW Virtual
Library can be obtained via http://www.w3.org/pub/DataSources/bySubject/
Overview.html.
Other useful population guides, outside the
WWW Virtual Library series, are:
