Taiwan has been experiencing radical fertility transition over the past several decades. Initially, Taiwan struggled against the population explosion caused by high fertility level. However, depopulation nightmare is currently suffered by Taiwan's demographic regime. Classical Lotka's stable population model has extensively employed to study the relationship between vital dynamics and age structure. Keyfits suggested the population momentum approach by relating stable population model to population size rather than to age structure or vital dynamics. In this study, we adopt Keyfit's new formulation and apply it to the non-stable, or variable-r, demographic conditions in Taiwan. Based on the findings from non-stable population model, the momentum effect of population growth in Taiwan is more pessimistic than any image suggested by previous studies. Were we able to raising Taiwan's lowest-low fertility to the replacement level, it is going to losing the population size more than 25% in the future.

The transition in living arrangements among the elderly based on whether to live with children is classified into ”transition to live apart from children among those living with children at baseline” and ”transition to live with children among those living apart from children at baseline”. The value placed on family was often used to explain the influence on living arrangements transitions in previous literature. Yet economic factors have become important in modern society, therefore we need to use exchange theory to strengthen the explanation on transitions. However this argument was not often discussed in previous literature in Taiwan, and the related research was lacking, owing to the insufficiency of long-term data which may be used for analysis. This paper, therefore, attempts to compare these two explanations through analyzing transitions, and to examine the effects of these two viewpoints on transitions. Using a longitudinal data source, the Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan, produced by the Department of Health, R.O.C. (Taiwan) and the University of Michigan, a multiple logistic regression model is used to observe the behavior of transitions in the 7 years between 1989 and 1996. The contribution of this article mainly lies in taking the dynamic variables, the changes of related variables between baseline and follow-up, as independent variables to examine the influence on the transitions. The empirical results of this paper show that both family value and exchange theory cause the living arrangements transitions, but there is not enough evidence to prove that a senior's health deterioration or the loss of a spouse was the major determinant of the transition to live with children. On the contrary, transitions of living arrangements are more likely to occur when a senior changes his/her role as the economic decision-maker into the non economic decision-maker of the household or vice versa. That implies the influence of family values on transitions is decreasing, and the influence of exchange theory is increasing.

This research examined the diasporic identities of Taiwanese immigrants in Brisbane, Australia, using theoretical frameworks of both Mead's symbolic interactionism and Barth's theory of ethnic boundary to analyze the ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews the researcher conducted with 65 Taiwanese migrants in Brisbane, in order to understand how Taiwanese migrants construct self identities through interpersonal interactions and how they construct imagined communities. In Mead's symbolic interactionism, the crucial factor to articulate self identity and imagined community was the ”significant symbol”. However, Mead seemed to consider the ”identifying” significant symbols only within a community. He ignored the ”differentiating” significant symbols derived from inter-group contact which would also form an ethnic boundary. The researcher combined the theories of Mead and of Barth to demonstrate that boundary contains two characteristics at the same time: differentiating (my own group from other groups) and connecting (members of my own group). The combined approach complements Mead's symbolic interactionism, which focused primarily on identifying the commons, and better represents the core nature of identity: it is both difference and similarity at the same time.
The research results showed that the diasporic identities among Taiwanese immigrants in Australia are a ”hybrid imagined community” consisting of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Australian imagined communities. Eight kinds of ethnic identities originated from those three imagined communities: ”Taiwanese in Australia”, ”both (or both not) Taiwanese and Australian (or the combination of both types with various ratios)”, ” Taiwanese Australian”, ”Chinese Australian”, ”Chinese or Chinese from Taiwan”, ”Australian when in Australia, and Taiwanese when in Taiwanese”, ”global citizen”, and ”Asian Australian”. For Taiwanese diaspora, the boundary of diasporic identities could neither be completely maintained nor eroded. There are boundary crossings. It is fluid boundary that could be crossed, contradicted, and negotiated. The understanding of diasporic migrant identities under globalization and multicultural development should focus on the fluidity and hybridism within identities. Diasporic groups belong to different communities at the same time. The ”hybrid imagined community” is emerging within diasporic groups.

Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1886 through 1945. It has been transforming into a democratic nation after WWII. Consistent statistics on Taiwan's population for the 20th century are unconceivable due to two distinct political regimes using different jurisdiction categories, each of which contains different geographical areas as well as different numbers of lower tiers. The difficulties in integrating the pre-war and post-war sets of data into a single system are tedious and formidable. Yet integrated population statistics at the sub-provincial layer across two regimes have been advanced in this work. By carefully and appropriately converting the geographical area associated with the population of every local jurisdiction during the period of Japanese governance into the current categories of administrative jurisdiction, we offer the possibility of setting up a century long set of population statistics. The results will facilitate a number of long term studies on Taiwan in the future.

The objective of the population and housing census is to collect demographic information on the population in a nation or an area which will be used as a reference for government planning and policymaking. Because of dramatic changes in the social environment, some problems are generated, such as increases in survey cost, non-response rate, and data demand. Although many countries are still using the Traditional Census method for the 2010 census, some are active in developing new methods to improve the quality of data collected and to decrease the survey cost.
Following the examples of Singapore, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), the method for conducting the 2010 Taiwan Census will be different, changing from the traditional census to a registry-based census with sampling survey. This method will integrate the official registry system to acquire the basic demographic characteristics, and collect more detailed information on the social and economic topics, including the aspects of education, fertility, and elder care by using sampling methods. Consequently, this research will be separated into two parts. The first part will introduce and analyze several common census methods used, including the Traditional Census method, Registry-Based Census, Registry-Based Census with Sampling Survey, and the Rolling Census. In addition, the target population of 2010 Taiwan Census is the de jure population, and we shall also discuss its potential problems.
In the second part, the research will further examine the survey methods that will be used for the U.S. and French censuses, including the design concept and the sampling method executed by the American Community Survey (ACS) to replace the long-form questionnaire for the 2010 U.S. Census. Finally, we will discuss the restrictions of using sampling to collect data, compare the strengths and weaknesses of census and the different sampling methods, as well as analyze the problems related to the registered population and the permanent residents.