PUBPOL 4080 - Demographic Techniques

(crosslisted) GDEV 4080
(CU-UGR)

Fall. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: PUBPOL 2030. Enrollment limited to: undergraduate students. Co-meets with GDEV 6080/PUBPOL 6060.

P. Eloundou-Enyegue.

This course explores social change through demographic methods, addressing how public policies aim to impact societal outcomes—such as reducing crime rates, lowering poverty levels, or increasing voter turnout—rather than focusing on individual behavior. While quantitative social science often emphasizes understanding individual actions, this course provides methods that bridge the gap between individual patterns and broader societal trends. Building on foundational techniques from introductory social statistics courses—such as univariate, bivariate, and multivariate regression—the course covers life tables, Lexis diagrams, and decomposition methods. These demographic methods focus on population-level dynamics and the changing composition of national populations, making the course essential for social scientists and policy analysts interested in examining the trends, causes, and consequences of aggregate social change.

Outcome 1: Demonstrate how to build a life table using various methods and understand the connections between life tables and survival analysis.

Outcome 2: Think creatively about how to use these methods and existing data to make a novel research contribution.

Outcome 3: Write clearly about what the results from life tables can tell us about demographic processes.