Overview
- Provides a new theoretical framework for understanding fertility variation and change
- Integrates family demography with social theory
- Synthesizes knowledge from social and cognitive sciences
- Provides a number of innovative ideas to explicate mechanisms of family change
Part of the book series: Understanding Population Trends and Processes (UPTA, volume 5)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies, and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister disciplines—from cultural anthropology to social psychology to cognitive science and beyond—have made dramatic strides in understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains, cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in that process. Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action argues that social demography must be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs. This approach upends many assumptions in social demography, encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture, of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.
Reviews
This volume authored by renowned socio-demographers is a remarkable "enterprise".
European Journal of Population 28:2 (2012)
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Understanding Family Change and Variation
Book Subtitle: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action
Authors: Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks, Christine A. Bachrach, S. Philip Morgan, Hans-Peter Kohler
Series Title: Understanding Population Trends and Processes
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1945-3
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Netherlands 2011
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-007-1944-6Published: 28 August 2011
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-3700-6Published: 27 November 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-1945-3Published: 27 August 2011
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 180
Topics: Demography, Family, Anthropology