Giovanna Merli: The Changing Intellectual Landscape of Demography: A Computational Look at Published Scholarship, 1950-2020

On November 19, 2021, Giovanna Merli, Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Duke University and a member of the Duke Global Health Institute, will present “The Changing Intellectual Landscape of Demography: A Computational Look at Published Scholarship, 1950-2020” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2021-2022 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Her research straddles three disciplinary realms: demography, contemporary Chinese society and global health. She focuses on a range of population and health issues in developing countries that intersect frontline public policy, such as the role of China’s population control program in lowering fertility preferences and fertility rates in China, the social and behavioral determinants of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and the evaluation of methodological approaches to sample hard-to-reach and hidden populations at high risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS. Merli combines her passion for demography and her 20-years experience with living in, studying and conducting research in China in her most recent work. China is a very low HIV prevalence setting but infection rates are high in some population groups whose behaviors are driving the Chinese epidemic. Thus, it is crucial to understand the social and behavioral patterns that put population groups with different risk profiles in contact with each other. Merli’s work examines the social and behavioral factors that create conditions which lead individuals in China to acquire HIV infection. This work is crucial to inform the design of appropriate interventions to prevent further spread of infection. Merli also studies HIV/AIDS in another, very different setting of the global HIV epidemic, South Africa, where the AIDS morbidity and mortality crises are tantamount to a perturbation of the age structure. HIV/AIDS in South Africa mostly affects individuals in the mid-adult ages and her work focuses on understanding the consequences of this mortality and morbidity crisis for families and households. Research in China is my comparative advantage.

Abstract:

Much of what we know about the intellectual landscape of demography comes from subjective narratives authored by leaders in the field, whose reviews and observations are grounded in their broad knowledge of the field. Here we use bibliographic information from all articles in the journals Demography, Population Studies and Population and Development Review to survey the changing contours of the field over the past 70 years. We characterize the field by applying a two-pronged, data-driven approach from the sociology of science. The first uses natural language processing that lets the substance of the field emerge from the contents of publication records and applies social network analyses to identify groups of papers that talk about the same thing. The second uses bibliometric tools to capture demographers’ reliance on other disciplines. Our goals are to (a) identify the primary topics of demography since the discipline first gained prominence as an organized field; (b) assess changes in the field’s intellectual cohesion and the topical areas that have grown or shrunk; (c) examine how demographers place their work in relationship to other disciplines and our field’s visibility in the scientific literature. We discuss prospects for the continued scientific importance of demography as a standalone research field and its public visibility.

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