Essay On Demography

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Demography is an 1855 coined intellectual field of study deeply rooted in Greek diction of Demos and Graphien. Weeks (1994:25) defines demography as a science concerned with the analysis of size, distribution, structure, characteristics and processes of a population. This among many definitions depict the mutual ideology that demography is a field of study which fuses the humanities and sciences. This field of study has throughout times encountered criticism, lacked formal recognition and sometimes labelled “data rich and theory poor” (Vance, 1952). In South Africa the same scenario prevails as the development of demography has been influenced by policies as well as historical and academic transition, the impact of demography is best depicted in its role in policy formulation and application in research. Demography as a field of knowledge has been clouded by sense of uncertainty, lack of acknowledgement/ proper categorisation. Nam(1979:486) reveals this ideology as he looks into the lack of proper titles for demographers in respective fields who are referred simple as sociologists, ecologists, social science analysts or management experts, a critical analysis of the …show more content…

South Africa’s apartheid era played a role in the demography of South Africa being under researched, the policies implemented in this era politicised and regulated the use of demographic data and at the same time afforded great secrecy and security to its usage and analysis, this then meant that data was merely collected devoid of interpretation and analysis. The establishment of Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) came along with it advancements that have seen the release of three censuses in 1996,2001 and 2011. These enumerations and disseminations of the data have provided ‘at least rudimentary knowledge” of the population