8.1 Investigating Human Population Dynamics
This page takes you through investigating factors related to human population dynamics.
Teacher only boxThis is one of my favourite investigations, and ESS students generally love this topic. It can involve handling a lot of data and so is good practice for using spreadsheets and learning how to process data. This is good practice for secondary data analysis prior to an IA.
These are the instructions I give to my students but I walk them through each step, helping them develop research questions, use Excel, processing the data, and choosing suitable countries to ensure a decent sampling strategy. Gapminder compiles statistical information about demographics and socio-economic data. We will use this site to generate data for a range of countries and then map demographic statistics and population growth rates.
Investigating the relationship between a socio-economic factor and a demographic factor
Starting activity
A good introductory video from Hans Rosling although there are many other excellent talks from Hans (just search Hans Rosling on YouTube):
Teacher only boxThe idea behind the following investigation, is to help students understand some simple relationships between socio-economic factors and demographic factors. It also helps them develop their use of Excel to produce tables, plot scatter graphs and find the R2 value to check for the fit of the data to a trendline. You can then go on to check for a correlation using a regression analysis and Spearman Rank or Pearson Correlation depending upon the shape of the relationship. See Statistical Tests
The data available in Gapminder and other sites can be used to investigate other relationships for the Independent Investigation, using the same strategies in this investigation.
Students will produce a mini-report on their investigation using a mini-version of the IA template, training them to move away from a standard science lab report.
What is a socio-economic factor in this investigation?
We are looking for factors that you would hypothesise have had an impact on slowing population growth. In this investigation, we are looking for data to confirm what we would expect based on the demographic transition model and your understanding of population dynamics. These examples cover many different data types in Gapminder.
Examples include:
- Literacy
- Years in school
- Use of contraception
- Health care availability
- Disease
- Income
- Female employment
- Human Development Index
What is a demographic factor in this investigation?
We are looking for factors that you would hypothesise would indicate slowing population growth and socio-economic status. These examples cover several data types in Gapminder.
Examples include:
- Crude birth rate
- Crude death rate
- total fertility rate
- infant mortality
- life expectancy
Step 1
PRELIMINARY RESEARCH - Use Gapminder Tools to check if two factors have a relationship - test your hypothesis. The socio-economic factor should be on the x axis (independent variable) and the demographic factor on the y axis (dependent variable) as you are hypothesising that the socio-economic factor changes are having an impact on the demographic factor.
Step 2
Finalise your RESEARCH QUESTION. It should look something like this:
"To what extent is the crude birth rate of a country impacted by the level of literacy in females?"
Step 3
Research and write about 100 - 200 words explaining the CONTEXT of your research. Explain why you are looking at the relationship between these two factors.
Step 4
Decide upon your SAMPLING STRATEGY. You need to collect sufficient data to answer your question. The minimum number of countries to include in your analysis is 30 countries to provide enough data to have more validity in your conclusions. You need to decide how to sample the available data. One method is to include all countries which are common in both data sets (maximum available sample size). Another method is to randomly sample the countries based on a random number selection or a method based on the alphabet. Finally, you may want to choose countries based on some other data, such as the income bracket of a country. You could use the World Bank Open Data for this. You should be aware that this may bias your data but it is a valid sampling strategy.
Step 5
Go to Gapminder Data and download your data. For an Independent Investigation you should consider that there are other sources for such data and that it might be worth finding multiple sources of data for your investigation then calculating means of the data. The data comes as an Excel or csv file and you should check that you can access the data.
Choose data from one common year in both sets of data. Try to find the most recent common year with lots of data. If you need to use two different years, then you will need to comment on this in your evaluation of the data.
Copy the data into one file with three columns.
| Country | Socio-Economic Data (Year and Units) | Demographic Data (Year and Units) |
|---|---|---|
Edit the data so that you have the data aligned correctly for each country (this is trickier than you might think). Allow about 30 minutes.
Step 6
Plot a scatter graph of your data. Add a trendline and the R2 value. Improve the presentation of your graph with an informative title, labels on the axis and gridlines that aid interpretation. Excel does not name the countries on the scatter plot and so you need to use your data table to identify any particular points on your graph. In order to have your socio-economics factor on the axis axis, it should be in your first column of data.
Here is an example:
Step 8
Complete your report. It should include:
- Context - What are you investigating and why?
- Research Question
- Sampling Strategy - how are you investigating your RQ
- Data - Graph of data with trendline and R2 value
- Data Analysis - Description of the trend, statistical test. Is your correlation statistically significant?
- Discussion - Put the trend into context using 3 countries and how they fit or do not fit the pattern seen.
- Unanswered questions: how could you take this further and what would you improve?
- References / Bibliography (have you in-text cited?
- Appendix - include a data table of your data
Further reading
Useful Reference Sources:
Gapminder - The Rosling family's non-profit organisation furthering the UN's sustainable development goals.
Population Reference Bureau. Population Data Sheet and fact sheets
US Census Bureau International Database Search Facility
United Nations Statistics Division
World Bank Data - this is useful for categorising countries according to their income.
Here's Hans Rosling showing you how to use Gapminder:
Tip: This is a good opportunity to talk about correlation and causation. Here's some funny graphs to get the point across.
Here's an interesting TEDx talk on the topic.
This is a piece of student work done before the days of Google Docs that I still have. It's from before the new course but follows the same ideas.