WHELPTON, P. K.

(1893–1964)

Pioneer American demographer. Pascal Kidder Whelpton did his undergraduate studies at Cornell University and obtained a graduate degree from the University of Nebraska. His career started with extension work for the Department of Agriculture in agricultural economics and then in a faculty position at Texas A & M University. In 1924 he joined Warren S. Thompson at the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His relationship with the Scripps Foundation–he became Associate Director in 1940, Director in 1953–continued until his retirement in 1963. He was president of the Population Association of America in 1941-42 and director of the United Nations Population Division (1950–1953).

Thompson and Whelpton together won national prominence with their 1928 article "Population of the United States 1925–1975," published in the American Journal of Sociology and with a series of subsequent publications on U.S. future population trends. They presented population projections using the cohort component method, which had been introduced by English economist Edwin Cannan at the end of the nineteenth century and then used by the statistician Arthur Bowley in the 1920s. The method used a life table to calculate survivors of the initial populations classified by age and sex and added allowances for births and immigration. All three projection inputs–life table, birth rate, and rate of net immigration–required arbitrary assumptions about future demographic conditions; however, the resulting population trajectories seemed to accord with a wholly independent projection method, the logistic curve fitted to observed past population totals in studies by Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed of Johns Hopkins University. (Both kinds of projection, as it turned out, were large underestimates: U.S. population surged in the baby boom years and with high rates of immigration.).

Whelpton's main contribution to demography lies in his studies of fertility. Notable among these was Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility, known as the Indianapolis Study, published in five volumes over 1946–1958. This innovative research project, of which he was a principal investigator (together with Clyde V. Kiser), was based on field interviews and began the rich tradition of survey research on fertility. Whelpton was also closely involved with the Growth of American Families studies carried out in the 1950s and 1960s. He contributed to cohort methods of analyzing fertility, work that culminated in his book Cohort Fertility (1954). A selected bibliography of his writings is given in Durand (1964).

Demography has become more sophisticated since Whelpton's time, and some of the methods he used are obsolete, but his role as one of the founders will remain a permanent part of the history of the discipline.

bibliography

selected works by p. k. whelpton.

Freedman, Ronald, Pascal K. Whelpton, and Arthur A. Campbell. 1959. Family Planning, Sterility, and Population Growth. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Grabill, Wilson H., Clyde V. Kiser, and Pascal K. Whelpton. 1958. The Fertility of American Women. New York: Wiley. (Census Monograph Series).

Thompson, Warren S., and P. K. Whelpton. 1933. Population Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. Reprinted by Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York, 1969.

Thompson, Warren S., and P. K. Whelpton. 1943. Estimates of Future Population of the UnitedStates, 1940–2000. Washington: National Resources Planning Board.

Whelpton, P. K. 1954. Cohort Fertility: Native White Women in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Whelpton, Pascal K., Arthur A. Campbell, and John E. Patterson. 1966. Fertility and Family Planning in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Whelpton, P. K., and Clyde V. Kiser. 1953. "Résumé of the Indianapolis Study of Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility." Population Studies 7: 95–110.

Whelpton, P. K., and Clyde V. Kiser, eds. 1946–1958. Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility. 5 vols. New York: Milbank Memorial Fund.

selected works about p. k. whelpton.

Durand, John D. 1964. "Pascal Kidder Whelpton (1893–1964)." Population Index 30: 323–328.

Kiser, Clyde V. 1973. "Contributions of P. K. Whelpton to Demography." Social Biology 20: 438–447.

Nathan Keyfitz