Studying Human Populations

This is a textbook for graduate students and research workers in social statistics and related subject areas. It follows a novel curriculum developed around the basic statistical activities of sampling, measurement and inference. Statistics is defined broadly as making decisions in the presence of uncertainty that arises as a consequence of limited resources available for collecting information. A connecting link of the presented methods is the perspective of missing information, catering for a diverse class of problems that include nonresponse, imperfect measurement and causal inference. The monograph aims to prepare the reader for the career of an independent social statistician and to serve as a reference for methods, ideas for and ways of studying human populations.