Multistate Demography and its Data: A Comment

Much of sociology and practically all of demography deal with transitions of people from one state at a certain moment to another state a year or more later. It is now clear that all such calculations of transition or movement are formally identical with what may be called the basic migration problem. The arithmetic for handling people moving from the single to the married state is identical with that for them moving from New York to Pennsylvania. The papers in this issue cover a wide range of substantive problems and exemplify several points concerning the methodology of demography. They provide a fair sample of multidimensional theory, of the means of application to data, and of the results of that application. They demonstrate the advantage of incorporating several demographic processes in a single model, even though they leave some questions unanswered.