"A Demographer's Perspective on Longterm Social Change: 1972-2018"
The power of cohort replacement as a factor in population-level change is too often lost when a purely statistical approach to age-period-cohort models is taken. The real analytical power is in the observations that are lost and gained as cohorts exit and enter the population. These compositional shifts can be handled with simple descriptive models. I illustrate that perspective with four case studies--religious composition, women's labor force participation, men's and women's attitudes about gender roles, and adults' attitudes about sexual minorities--and a comprehensive macro analysis of all 236 longterm trends in the GSS.