New approaches to the social dynamics of long term fertility change.

During the past two centuries, populations have experienced remarkable changes in fertility, with new types of behavior often spreading rapidly across disparate social groups and regions. Evidence clarifying the complex dynamics of individual (non-)decision-making within, and influenced by evolving and overlapping social networks requires the development and application of cutting-edge modelling techniques to rich data sources that include economic, cultural and socio-demographic factors at the individual and aggregate levels. An interdisciplinary team of sociologists, historians, and applied statisticians will collaborate on methodological dimensions of the project. The specific aim is to improve procedures for hierarchical modeling. Fertility choices are made within the context of concurrent, interacting processes (labor market decisions, social mobility, migration), and the still unexplored interactions between these processes require novel statistical models that can acc ount for the spatial and temporal structure using extensive data sources.

Keywords:Long-term developments, Population studies, Agent-based modelling, Social dynamics, Fertility

Disciplines:Economic history, History, Applied mathematics in specific fields, Statistics and numerical methods, Demography, Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology