Associate Professor Heather Booth and Professor Zhongwei Zhao are both with ADSRI.

Microsimulation modelling has been increasingly used in demography, anthropology and many policy-related research areas over the last 40 years. This seminar will provide an introduction to two demographic microsimulation systems: SOCSIM and CAMSIM. Both systems were originally designed to simulate the impact of demographic conditions on kinship structure and household formation, but they have also been used to address many other research questions such as people’s potential residential patterns in the past, changes in the availability of kin in the next half century, the evaluation of historical data, and the investigation of other theoretical and methodological issues. This seminar will focus on the system design of SOCSIM and CAMSIM, their major characteristics and implications. It will also provide some examples of how the two systems can be used to examine complex demographic, anthropological and social research questions that cannot be studied using more conventional approaches.

This seminar is an important step of the project 'Using dynamic microsimulation to understand the evolution and structure of kin- and community- based populations in the past, present and future'. Funded by a 2011 CASS Continuing Projects Grant, this interdisciplinary research project involves researchers from the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, the Research School of Humanities and Arts (School of Archaeology and Anthropology) and the Research School of Social Sciences (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research). The major aim of the project is to build capacity in dynamic microsimulation in CASS and to apply it to major research questions in the interface between anthropology, demography, economic history and policy-related issues.