population
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One of the main factors affecting fertility, and an important contributor to the fertility differences among societies in which conscious fertility control is uncommon, is defined by the patterns of marriage and marital disruption. In many societies in Asia and Africa, for example, marriage occurs soon after the sexual maturation of the woman, around age 17. In contrast, delayed marriage has long been common in Europe, and in some European countries the average age of first marriage approaches 25 years.
In the 20th century dramatic changes have taken place in the patterns of marital dissolution caused by widowhood and divorce. Widowhood has long been common in all societies, but the declines of mortality (as discussed above) have sharply reduced the effects of this source of marital dissolution on fertility. Meanwhile, divorce has been transformed from an uncommon exception to an experience terminating a large proportion (sometimes more than a third) of marriages in some countries. Taken together, these components of marriage patterns can account for the elimination of as little as 20 percent to as much as 50 percent of the potential reproductive years.
Many Western countries have experienced significant increases in the numbers of cohabiting unmarried couples. In the 1970s some 12 percent of all Swedish couples living together aged 16 to 70 were unmarried. When in the United States in 1976 the number of such arrangements approached 1,000,000, the Bureau of the Census formulated a new statistical category—POSSLQ—denoting persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters. Extramarital fertility as a percentage of overall fertility accordingly has risen in many Western countries, accounting for one in five births in the United States, one in five in Denmark, and one in three in Sweden.
Migration
Since any population that is not closed can be augmented or depleted by in-migration or out-migration, migration patterns must be considered carefully in analyzing population change. The common definition of human migration limits the term to permanent change of residence (conventionally, for at least one year), so as to distinguish it from commuting and other more frequent but temporary movements.
Human migrations have been fundamental to the broad sweep of human history and have themselves changed in basic ways over the epochs. Many of these historical migrations have by no means been the morally uplifting experiences depicted in mythologies of heroic conquerors, explorers, and pioneers; rather they frequently have been characterized by violence, destruction, bondage, mass mortality, and genocide—in other words, by human suffering of profound magnitudes.
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