Describe development of population geography as a field of specialization
Answers
The development of population geography was, however, not as rapid as one might have expected in the decade from mid-sixties to mid-seventies. No further addition to the existing textbooks on the sub-discipline took place during the period. The research output was also not as focused or as innovative as in some other aspects of geography partly because the thrust was in areas somewhat peripheral to population geography (Clarke, 1977:137). Although, there were studies on the relationship of population phenomena with social or economic development, much of the works continued to be descriptive in nature.
Likewise, though fertility and mortality did attract the attention of population geographers, migration analysis engaged population geographers throughout much of the 1960s and the 1970s. Of many works on migration that appeared during the period, a mention may be made of People on the Move, which is a collection of 23 papers by Kosinski and Prothero in 1975.
A classic work on migration, it covered such wide-ranging topics as theoretical framework and typology of migration, problems of migration data, empirical and comparative studies of internal migration, issues related with different groups of migration etc. Undoubtedly, the aspect of population geography, which developed the most in the early decades, was migration analysis – an issue that never appealed to the demographers in the same way as did fertility, nuptiality and mortality.