Demography and Anthropology

These both disciplines share human population as their research subject though they focus on complementary aspects. Demography's primary concern is with the dynamic forces defining population size and structure and their variation across time and space, social and cultural anthropology focuses on the social organization shaping people's production and reproduction. Given these different focuses the methodological approaches too are quite different demography's stress is on collected data, mathematical modeling and the estimation testing system, anthropology is mostly qualitative based on case studies and inductive. Anthropological demography an emerging branch uses anthropological theory and methods to investigate demographic events. The main theoretical concepts in anthropological demography are known as culture, gender, religious institutions and political economy. Generally, its theoretical research approach includes a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies applied to case studies. The ethnographic research and participant observation are often central to this approach as is interpretative reading o primary data historical material.   

Anthropologists tend to be skeptical about demographer's emphasis on statistical representative their comparable nature of data collected through standardized surveys, they claim that the demographer's pay little attention to their validity of the data, to the analytically models and their interpretation. Despite such divergences scholars in both disciplines have occasionally come together, working in multidisciplinary research teams, and created complex research models to build on mutual strengths and reduce disciplinary limitations thus launching their field of anthropological demography. Anthropological demography within demography is still evolving.