DEMOGRAPHYremote areas. Transportation lines, whether cara-
van, rail, or superhighway, extend across remote
areas to connect distant population centers. Stops
along the way become villages and towns specializ-
ing in servicing the travelers and the goods in
transit. These places are no longer ‘‘remote.’’ Ex-
ploitation of resources proximate to these places
may now become viable because of the access to
transportation as well as services newly available in
the stopover towns.
As the increasing efficiency of agriculture has
released larger and larger fractions of the popula-
tion from the need to till the soil, it has become
possible to sustain increasing numbers of urban
people. There is a kind of urban transition more or
less concomitant with the demographic transition
during which a population’s distribution by city
size shifts to larger and larger sizes (Kelley and
Williamson 1984; Wrigley 1987). Of course, the
continuing urban transition presents continuing
problems for the developing world (United Na-
tions 1998).
Population Composition. The characteristics in-
cluded as compositional ones in demographic work
are not predefined theoretically, with the excep-
tion, perhaps, of age and sex. In general, composi-
tional characteristics are those characteristics in-
quired about on censuses, demographic surveys,
and vital registration forms. Such items vary over
time as social, economic, and political concerns
change. Nonetheless, it is possible to classify most
compositional items into one of three classes. First
are those items that are close to the reproductive
core of a society. They include age, sex, family
relationships, and household living arrangements.
The second group of items are those characteris-
tics that identify the major, usually fairly endoga-
mous, social groups in the population. They in-
clude race, ethnicity, religion, and language. Finally
there is a set of socioeconomic characteristics such
as education, occupation, industry, earnings, and
labor force participation.
Within the first category of characteristics,
contemporary research interest has focused on
families and households because the period since
1970 has seen such dramatic changes in developed
countries (Van de Kaa 1987; Davis 1985; Farley
1996, ch. 2). Divorce, previously uncommon, has
become a common event. Many couples now live
together without record of a civil or religious
ceremony having occurred. Generally these un-
ions are not initially for the purposes of procrea-
tion, although children are sometimes born into
them. Sometimes they appear to be trial marriages
and are succeeded by legal marriages. A small but
increasing fraction of women in the more devel-
oped countries seem to feel that a husband is not a
necessary ornament to motherhood. Because of
these changes, older models of how marriage comes
about and how marriage relates to fertility (Coale
and McNeil 1972; Coale and Trussell 1974) are in
need of review as demographers work toward a
new demography of the family (Bongaarts 1983;
Keyfitz 1987).Those characteristics that indicate member-
ship in one or another of the major social group-
ings within a population vary from place to place.
Since such social groupings are the basis of ine-
quality, political division, or cultural separation,
their demography becomes of interest to social
scientists and to policy makers (Harrison and
Bennett 1995). To the degree that endogamy holds,
it is often useful to analyze a social group as a
separate population, as is done for the black popu-
lation in the United States (Farley 1970). Fertility
and mortality rates, as well as marital and family
arrangements, for blacks in the United States are
different from those of the majority population.
The relationship between these facts, their impli-
cations, and the socioeconomic discrimination and
residential segregation experienced by this popu-
lation is a matter of historic and continuing schol-
arly work (Farley and Allen 1987; Lieberson 1980;
Farley 1996, ch. 6).For other groups, such as religious or ethnic
groups in the United States, the issue of endogamy
becomes central in determining the continuing
importance of the characteristic for the social life
of the larger population (Johnson 1980; Kalmijn
1991). Unlike the black population, ethnic and
religious groups seem to be of decreasing appro-
priateness to analyze as separate populations with-
in the United States, since membership may be a
matter of changeable opinion.The socioeconomic characteristics of a popu-
lation are analyzed widely by sociologists, econo-
mists, and policy-oriented researchers. Other than
being involved in the data production for much of
this research, the uniquely demographic contribu-
tions come in two ways. First is the consideration