Exploring Stable Population Concepts from the Perspective of Cohort Change Ratios: Estimating Time to Stability and Intrinsic r

David A. Swanson, University of California, Riverside
Lucky M. Tedrow, Western Washington University

Cohort Change Ratios (CCRs) have a long history of use in demography. In spite of their history of use, they appear, however, to have been overlooked in regard to a major canon of formal demography, stable population theory. In this paper, CCRs are explored as a tool for examining the idea of a stable population. In comparing the approach using CCRs to the traditional analytical approach, benefits and drawbacks are noted. The paper also introduces an Index of Stability, which is used in a regression model to estimate the number of years before the population in question becomes (approximately) stable. The regression model works reasonably well and, as such, provides something not available in the traditional analytical approach, which is an estimate of the time to (approximate) stability for a given population.