Model-Based Demography: Essays on Integrating Data, Technique and Theory (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9783319654324)

After completing his graduate work in sociology and demography at the Office of Population

Research, Princeton University, Thomas Burch taught at Marquette, and at Georgetown University, where he helped found the Center for Population Research. From 1970 to 1975 he served in the Demographic Division [Associated Director] of The Population Council. He then joined the University of Western Ontario to help develop a new Ph.D. program in social demography. He was elected President of the Canadian Population Society in 1992-94, and received that organization's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Currently he is Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria and Research Affiliate of the Centre for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington. His main research interests have been fertility, marriage and divorce, household and family structure, and kinship. He has had an abiding interest in demographic theory, and concern over the relative neglect of the

ory by the discipline. In the 1990's, he began to develop a new vision for the codification, presentation, and future development of demography, based on the 'semantic' or 'model-based' approach to the philosophy of science. In this view of demography, technique, empirical research and theory are in better balance. And demography is seen to have more good theory than is generally realized.