An Interdisciplinary Spatiotemporal Population Model

Guangqing Chi, Mississippi State University
Stephen J Ventura, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Population change has been studied in several fields including demography, human ecology, population geography, environmental sociology, transportation planning, and regional economics. However, little systematic work has been undertaken to synthesize their different approaches to and views on population change. In this study, we examine population change holistically in an attempt to shed light on the mechanism of population change. We first systematize population change’s driving forces and spatial and temporal dimensions from an interdisciplinary perspective. The driving forces are organized and developed into five indices – demographics, livability, accessibility, desirability, and developability. We then test our approach by examining population change from 1970-2000 in Wisconsin at the municipal level. The findings suggest that such an approach helps systematically understand driving factors’ effects on population change, minimize the multicollinearity, reduce heteroskedasticity, eliminate spatial error and lag dependence, and integrate the two seemingly unmixable approaches of environmental modeling and demographic modeling together.