Welcome to the Demography & Population Studies Programme

Population Studies - "Not Just Counting People - Ensuring that people count"

Population problems are among the most serious challenges to human destiny for the twenty-first century. The developed and developing countries are facing contrasting population problems. While developed countries are experiencing below replacement level fertility, developing countries are still grappling with reducing fertility. This has implications for environment, employment, work and family, health, population distribution, urbanisation, migration, old age security and refugee movement. It is thus important that integrated approaches to population and economic problems be advanced by population research, and that policy makers and planners pay serious attention to population trends, their causes and their implications.

Our programme has a particular interest in the South Pacific Region, and in New Zealand population trends, manages research programmes on family structures, fertility and family formation, labour force and employment relating to New Zealand; and individual researchers work on India, Africa, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific; and on a range of themes, mortality, social policy, fertility, migration, families and households, labour force, income etc.

The School of Social Sciences co-ordinates an interdisciplinary undergraduate teaching programe, administers Graduate study in Demography, generates and co-ordinates research in population studies, and provides a service function in this field. Courses are offered leading to a first degree (BSocSc) majoring in geography or sociology or other fields, with Population Studies as a further main component. There are also programmes leading to graduate degrees in Demography, for the BSocSc (Hons), MSocSc, the MPhil and the PhD.