The Global Social Change Research Project is a project devoted to bringing a clear understanding to the general public about

social change Social change is the alteration of the social order of a society which may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Definition Social change may not refer to the notion of social progress or soci ...

. They have reports about social, political, economic, demographic and technological change throughout the world.

History of the project

This project was started shortly before 2000. Since the project started producing reports, their reports have been cited in a wide variety of academic topics, such as general global social and economic transformation,

economic inequality There are wide varieties of economic inequality, most notably income inequality measured using the distribution of income (the amount of money people are paid) and wealth inequality measured using the distribution of wealth (the amount of ...

, macromarketing,

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...

and rural development, organizational change,

capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private ...

, tourism,

economic growth Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate o ...

, urban sustainability, regionalism and policy and especially in the area of

quality of life Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards ...

. In addition to producing social change reports, staff from the project have written on applied

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

throughout the world, conducted research about

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

, and reviewed books on various topics such as applied

statistics Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...

for

public policy Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. Public ...

democracy Democracy (From grc, δημοκρατία, dēmokratía, ''dēmos'' 'people' and ''kratos'' 'rule') is a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (" direct democracy"), or to choose g ...

and

governance Governance is the process of interactions through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society over a social system ( family, tribe, formal or informal organization, a territory or across territories). It is done by the g ...

and history. Reports from the project have been cited by a number of texts and studies, such as a course on sustainable development, a chapter in a book on transnational

education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...

, a chapter in a book on demographic changes and tourism, and a paper on political regimes and education.

Major areas of study

Some of the major reports from the study describe available indicators on the web to measure

or progress of the world. Reports in 2011 showed that

world population In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded 8 billion in November 2022. It took over 200,000 years of human prehistory and history for th ...

growth was slowing, and that inequality in

infant mortality Infant mortality is the death of young children under the age of 1. This death toll is measured by the infant mortality rate (IMR), which is the probability of deaths of children under one year of age per 1000 live births. The under-five morta ...

rates between developing and developed countries was declining, mainly because infant mortality rates among developed countries had become very low, and so stopped declining.Shackman, Gene, Xun Wang and Ya-Lin Liu. 2011. Brief Review of Trends in World Infant Mortality Rate. The Global Social Change Research Project. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2179722

Reports

One of the main conclusions from the population trend reports is that from 1950 to 2010, the distribution of world population changed significantly. The largest change was that Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean increased from 17.3% to 25% of the world population while Northern America and Europe declined from 22.7% to 12.4%. Asia changed little, only increasing from 60% of world population to 63%.

Notes

External links

The Global Social Change Research Project Global Social Change reports at SSRNUpdated pages for free to use data and free to read journals

Free Resources for Evaluation and Research Methods
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201020103417/https://sites.google.com/site/gsocialchange/home , date=2020-10-20 Social change Projects established in 2000