The Italian Association for Population Studies (AISP) is the Demography Section of the Italian Statistics Society .
AISP has been formally founded in June 2008 during the 44th Scientific Meeting of the SIS.
The Association complies with the indications and general rules of the SIS (Società Italiana di Statistica), and, in particular, endeavours to organise its own initiatives so as to favour synergies with SIS.
At the end of 2018, AISP had about 300 members. Most AISP members are demographers (55%) and social statisticians (27%), but also sociologists, statisticians, economic statisticians and economists.
A brief history
Although formally founded only in June 2008 during the 44th Scientific Meeting of the SIS, the Association has a longer history, dating back at least to 1991, when the Gruppo di Coordinamento per la Demografia (GCD) – Group for the Coordination of Demography – was formally created within the SIS (Italian Statistical Society).
Before that, back in the 1980s, following the incorporation of the IRP/Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione (Population Research Institute) into the CNR, Italian demographers had started to develop a network of scientific initiatives, carried out partly within the SIS, partly within the SIEDS/Società Italiana di Economia Demografia e Statistica (Italian Society of Economics, Demographics and Statistics) and partly within the newly formed SIDES/Società Italiana di Demografia Storica (Italian Society of Historic Demographics).
The start-up programme of the GCD was influenced by the example of the Population Association of America, from which it borrowed the idea of holding periodic Meetings called Population Days (the first was held in Bologna, in 1992), where both fully elaborated articles and provisional papers could be presented. In the aim of broadening the knowledge on current research, the decision was taken to publish every other year a list of the demographic studies conducted by Italian scholars over the previous two years. A Scientific Council, guided by a coordinator (the first was Paolo De Sandre), was appointed by the Assembly with the aim of promoting all the initiatives deemed useful for population studies: e.g. the biannual Meetings, Seminars, a Newsletter, etc.
Considerable progress has been made since those early days. The Population Days, in particular, has developed into an important and periodic Conference, which has recently (in 2009) become international, with the inclusion of sessions held in English and with demographers from abroad. Since 2007, the AISP also edits the biannual Population Report : an accurate and updated study of state of the Italian Population, written in a plain language, accessible to a wide audience.