Health Demography: An Evolving Discipline

Abstract

Health demography is a subdiscipline within the field of demography that involves the application of the content and methods of demography to the study of health and healthcare. Demography, or the study of human populations, focuses on the study of the size, distribution, and composition of populations, as well as related dynamic processes such as fertility, mortality, and migration. Health and healthcare refer, respectively, to the condition of health as experienced by individuals and populations and to the operation of the healthcare delivery system. Health demography concerns itself with the manner in which demographic attributes influence both the health status and health behavior of populations and how, in turn, health-related phenomena affect demographic attributes. Health demography shares an interest in individual-level health issues with clinical medicine and in population-level health issues with social epidemiology.