Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2018 number

The article subject is the problems of forming the theoretical-methodological base in historical demography research. Its present state hinders the vision of population demographic development as an integral autonomous process having own internal determinants, and at the same time affecting actively all social processes. The paper objective is to overcome this constraint and to propose a variant of this base for studying the population history of Russia in the XX-XXI centuries. The author shows that the multifaceted nature of the research object - the population in a historical context - requires a multi-layered theoretical-methodological approach and a multi-disciplinary methodological design consisting of macro-, meso- and micro-level representations. Each of them provides a solution to their own problems. The basis of the macro-level methodology is the theory of modernization. It interprets the essence of all processes taking place in the society and explains the features of this or that period in the history of the country where the population in question lives. The meso-level methodology is formed on the basis of theories and concepts that treat development processes of the actual population, all forms of its movement - natural, spatial, social. The task of this level is to determine the population place in the society, to explain the patterns of changes occurring in it, their directions and driving forces, the nature of interaction of population processes with other spheres of society and between each other. The micro-level methodology consists of concepts and categories of sciences that treat certain aspects of the particular population development (inhabitants of villages, cities, regions, etc.). A special level of methodology consists of approaches, principles, methods and procedures, borrowed from different sciences.