Sociální aspekty demografického vývoje

In the first part of this study, the author draws attention to several new trends in contemporary historical demography, which respond to the shift of contemporary historiography from structural approaches and statistical methods, such as the gathering and use of extensive national databases and the application of relevant statistical techniques during their analysis, when the borderline between social history and historic demography becomes blurred to a significant degree. At the same time it draws attention to problems hindering a similar approach in the Czech Republic. It considers the study of smaller samples of the population to offer better prospects, as the qualitative analysis can also be utilised. With regard to the extensive range of problems associated with the interrelation of social and demographic development, some very important issues have been overlooked by historical demographers (for example, the social consequences of migrations, the impact of tightening serfs´ conditions on migrations and differentiated demographic behaviour of various social groups). The author maintains that it would be beneficial, when studying family, to use, amongst other things, extensive and valuable factual data on the working class family collected before 1989 and now unjustly neglected.