Abstract
Demography is, by its very nature, concerned with people in places, although the history of the discipline over time reveals a struggle between the desire to find universal principles (such as the original model of the demographic transition) and the recognition that spatial variation is itself a universal principle. Demography is in the process of evolving from a spatially aware science to a spatially analytic science, and this book is part of that evolution. In this chapter I first offer a general framework for the application of spatial analysis to demographic research as a way of integrating and better understanding the different transitional components of the overall demographic transition. I then illustrate tools of spatial demography by applying them to an analysis of demographic change in the West African country of Ghana, with an added focus on Accra, the country’s capital city.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded in part by grant number R01 HD054906 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (“Health, Poverty and Place in Accra, Ghana,” John R. Weeks, Project Director/Principal Investigator). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development or the National Institutes of Health.
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Weeks, J.R. (2016). Demography Is an Inherently Spatial Science. In: Howell, F., Porter, J., Matthews, S. (eds) Recapturing Space: New Middle-Range Theory in Spatial Demography. Spatial Demography Book Series, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22810-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22810-5_6
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