The discipline of the study of human population is known by two terms: (1) Population studies and (2) Demography. Population studies can be understood easily as studies concerned with population, whereas demography can be explained by pointing out that it is derived from the Greek word demos, meaning people, and hence is the science of population.

Though these terms are often used interchangeably, some scholars have tried to distinguish between “demographic analysis” and “population studies.”

It is considered that “demographic analysis is confined to a study of the components of population variation and change”, whereas “population studies are concerned not only with population variables but also with the relationships between population changes and other variables social, economic, political, biological, genetic, geographical and the like.”

The term “demography” may be used in a narrow sense, as synonymous with “demographic analysis” or formal demography”, which is “primarily concerned with quantitative relations among demographic phenomena in abstraction from their association with other phenomena.”

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Demography may also be conceived in a broad sense to include, in addition to the quantitative study of population, the study of interrelationships between population and socio­economic, cultural and other variables. Many population scholars do not approve of creating such an artificial distinction between demography and population studies.

According to Lorimer, “a demographer limited to the merely formal treatment of changes in fertility, mortality, and mobility would be in a position like that of a ‘formal chemist’ observing the compression of mercury with no information about associated changes in temperature or the constitution of the liquid.

The concept of ‘pure demography’ except as the skeleton of science is therefore an illusion.”6 Any meaningful study of population, therefore, has to be interdisciplinary.

In this book, no distinction whatsoever has been made between the terms “demography” and “population studies” and the terms are used interchangeably throughout the text.