WISENET Journal No. 25, February 1991, p. 20
Dr Christabel Young is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Demography, Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS), Australian National University. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and is married with two teenage sons. She has a achelor of Science (Honours maths) from the University of Adelaide and a PhD from the Department of Demography, RSSS, Australian National University.
After completing her first degree, she decided she wanted to apply her mathematical skills to people rather than to the pure sciences. A few years of working with demograpbic statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, first in Adelaide and then in Canberra, convinced her that this was what she wanted to specialise in. She was subsequently awarded a scholarship in 1967 to study for her PhD.
Since 1970, Dr Young has been on the academic staff of, or otherwise associated with, the Australian National University. She was a Research Fellow in the Department of Demography, RSSS during 1970-1978, when she pioneered the demographic analysis of the family life cycle in Australia. This produced a series of articles and a monograph, The Family Life Cycle, which are widely cited by overseas researchers.
She took a six year break from full-time work during 1979-1984 in order to spend more time with her children. During those six years she canied out consultancies for various govemment departments and lectured part-time in demographic analysis and population studies in the Department of Sociology, in The Faculties. She returned to full-time work in 1985 as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Demography, RSSS.
During her academic career Dr Young has specialised in research on Australian demography, including mortality, the family life cycle, the female labour force, the characteristics of ethnic groups, and the demographic aspects of immigration and population policy. She has published in many Australian and overseas academic joumals, and has presented research papers at several Australian and intemational academic conferences. She has developed and teaches a course on Statistics for Demographers in the National Centre for Development Studies, ANU and has supervised several PhD students.
A special feature of Dr Young's work is that much of her demographic analysis relates to the experience of successive generations or cohorts rather than the more usual cross-sectional approach. This began with her PhD thesis on cohort analysis of mortality and population growth. The generation approach was also a major focus of her work on the family life cycle, and it again occurs in her recently completed study on female labour force participation, Balancing Families and Work (funded by the Department of Employment Education and Training). In this, historical data and recent statistics have been brought together to describe the labour force participation of successive generations of women in Australia.