AFST 43705 - Social Demography of US Minorities

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

Africana Studies

Description:

The intent of this demography course is to familiarize students with basic statistical methods and techniques that are applied to the study of population data. The course will offer students an opportunity to gain "hands-on" experience with manipulating quantitative data and generating results. The backdrop for the class is ethnic status. Because we will have access to social data for major ethnic categories (e.g., white, African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American), one of the byproducts of learning the methods and techniques of demographic analysis will be a comparative study of ethnic groups across several social dimensions. The first topic will be population growth. This will include discussions about birth rates, mortality rates, immigration, emigration, and how to generate population estimates. Another topic will be a broader discussion of rates that will distinguish incidence rates from prevalence rates, and show how they are applied to generate indicators of health, crime, school enrollment, service usage, and other social statistics. A review of direct and indirect standardization techniques, plus a review of how to analyze changing rates, will follow this discussion. Most rate changes can be attributable to either change in behaviors or population, or changes in both. How you decompose crude differences into their component parts is an essential step in understanding the dynamics of social phenomenon. This will be followed by a review of how we collect and study such social attainments as education, occupation, and income. Here we will examine issues of measurement (e.g., do we count years of attendance or credential earned) and various ways to generate difference measure (e.g., Gini index, index of dissimilarity, mean differences). This discussion will also include ways to decompose observed differences and generate hypothetical estimates of attainment via regression and discrete Markov processes. The final area to be reviewed will be the spatial distribution of residences in specified geographic locals. The major issues of discussion will be the heterogeneity or homogeneity of neighborhoods with regard to family income, educational background, ethnicity, or immigrant status.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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