Welcome

The Formal Demography Working Group aims to bring together formal demography scholars and those interested in formal demography to discuss recent and classic work, brainstorm new ideas, and to foster new collaborations. We meet virtually each month with meetings tentatively scheduled for the last Friday in every month. Our specific aims are to:

1. Bring an international community of scholars together with formal demography as the focus
2. Create a supportive and inclusive environment to learn, and encourage people to work with formal methods
3. Discuss the past, present and future of formal demography

We aim to run thematic meetings on research, training, and forums. More details can be found here.

Sign-up

If you would like to be included on the mailing list sign up here.

Register interest to present

If you are interested in presenting at a future meeting, fill out this form.

Next meeting

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, 26 January at 10 ET, with Matt Hauer giving a presentation on ‘Climate Migration, Demographic Amplification, and multiregional population projections’.

Previous meeting’s materials

• November 2022: Estimating mortality with imperfect data, November 29 at 9am ET. Bernardo Lanza Queiroz presented ‘Estimating adult mortality in countries with defective data: some alternative approaches’
  • Recording
  • Bernardo’s Slides
• October 2022: World Mortality Dataset, 18 October at 9am ET. Ariel Karlinsky presented on the World Mortality Dataset.
  • Recording
• September 2022: Outsurvival statistic, 30 September at 8am ET. Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher presented ‘Outsurvival statistic: Method and application to sex differences in lifespan’.
  • Recording
  • Marie-Pier’s slides
• February 2022: Kinship methods, February 25 at 1pm ET. Hal Caswell on the formal demography of kinship, and Diego Alburez-Gutierrez on the application of these methods using the DemoKin R package, developed by himself and Iván Williams.
  • Recording
  • Diego and Iván’s notes
• January 2022: Population momentum, Friday 28 January at 1pm ET. Roland Rau talking about his favorite formal demography paper.
  • Recording
  • Roland’s slides
  • Roland’s code: TO BE ADDED!
• December 2021: Decomposition methods, Friday 3 December at 10am ET. Tim Riffe on decomposition methods and how to implement them in R
  • Recording
  • Tim’s slides
  • Tim’s code and materials
• October 2021: Kick-off, Friday 29 October at 11am ET
  • Recording
  • Monica’s slides
  • Vanessa’s Slides

Links

• Demographic Research: Special Collection on Formal Relationships
• Ron Lee’s essay ‘Demography Abandons its Core’
• Here is a map of locations/affiliations of sign-ups as of October 2021. We are very international!
• (Past) Here is a list of formal demography presentations at IUSSP 2021.

Contact

This working group is organized by Vanessa Di Lego (Vienna Institute of Demography), Ryohei Mogi (University of Southern Denmark), and Monica Alexander (University of Toronto). It is still a very new idea and we are always open to suggestions and feedback.