Demography is the application of statistics to the study of the size, density, territorial distribution, and composition of populations, birth and death rates, migrations, and social mobility, both in the present and changes in those statistics over time. 

The application of demography to the study of society has a very long history going back to ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. English Economist Robert Malthus (1766-1834) and Belgian statistician and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) are one of the first to use demography not only to measure population statistics but to use it to explain how societies function and develop. Durkheim and his followers used demography as one of the most important bases for understanding social morphology. Proponents of human ecology approach used demographic data to study urban sociology. Russian sociologist Maksim Kovalevsky singled out: demographic, economic, political, ideological, and religious, conflict (internal and external conflicts), as well as social stratification, amount of knowledge, leadership, etc. as the main factors influencing social changes and social evolution and progress.

Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in the book Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928) names sociologists Coste Adolphe and Winiarski Leon as the most important examples of the demographic approach in sociology.     

Authors: Coste Adolphe, Winiarski Leon.