[Brownbag] Fw: NEXT MONDAY - SOCIOLOGY COLLOQUIUM (fwd)

[Liz Ozselcuk]

Of interest to Demographers:

MONDAY October 11th
BLUMER ROOM – 402 BARROWS HALL
2:00-3:30pm


The Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series
FALL 2010 Presents:


Aggregation Problems


Jennifer Johnson-Hanks
Departments of Sociology and Demography
University of California, Berkeley



Quetelet’s concept of the “average man” was an attempt to relate the
characteristics of the individual to the properties of the population
through simple aggregation. In the 150 years since Quetelet’s book, we
have come to take his position for granted--newspapers regularly report
on the experience of the average individual and policy is often aimed at
improving the lot of the average person. But aggregates have meaningful
characteristics that differ from the average of those who make up the
aggregate. We all know that averages ignore variation and lack nuance,
and that they miss much of ethnographic interest. Through four examples,
this chapter goes further to demonstrate that the average experience can
be systematically different from the experience of the aggregate. As a
result, when people reason about the aggregate by averaging the
experiences of individuals--whether of individuals that they know, or
individuals as measured in a survey--they will make systematic kinds of
errors. For many topics, we have to reason across different scales of
aggregation, each of which has its own, distinct dynamics.


Jenna Johnson-Hanks is Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography
at UC Berkeley, where she has taught since 2000. She earned her BA at
Berkeley and her PhD at Northwestern, both in Anthropology. Most of her
work explores the relationships between cultural practice, intentional
action, and demographic rates, particularly regarding sex, marriage, and
childbearing in West Africa and the US. Her first book, Uncertain Honor:
Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis, was published by the University
of Chicago Press in 2006. A co-authored book entitled Understanding
Family Change and Variation is forthcoming with Springer. She is
currently working on a book tentatively titled Sex in Public: Population
and the Paradox of Personal Choice.
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