Judith Blake

Judith Kincade Blake (March 3, 1926 – April 29, 1993) was an American sociologist and demographer. She established the first Department of Demography, at the University of California, Berkeley and was the first holder of an endowed chair, at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Blake carried out one of the earliest surveys of fertility and population in a developing country, in Jamaica. In a 1956 publication, she identified a key concept now known as "proximate determinants of fertility", which became a basis for subsequent fertility analysis and policy design. For much of her career, Blake studied the demographics of families, using available secondary or national US data sets to examine contemporary population policy issues. She frequently challenged conventional wisdom, and emphasized that economic theories were insufficient to explain population shifts. Her book Family Size and Achievement (1989) won the American Sociological Association's William J. Goode Book Award in 1990. She was ill most of her life.

While Blake was a graduate student, she worked as a research assistant at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. Her work was one of the earliest surveys on such a topic to be done in a developing country. Previous work in the field of population studies been done by Paul K. Hatt and Joe Stycos in Puerto Rico. and "Are babies consumer durables?" (1968). She examined attitudes and practices around birth control, finding similarities between Catholics and non-Catholics, and predicted a backlash in attitudes to abortion in "Abortion and Public Opinion" (1971).

Judith's presentation of these analyses continued to point out that child-bearing decisions are made within a web of familial relationships and motivations within a societal and institutional culture. The ramifications of these decisions have relevance for both the individual and the society. – Linda B. Bourque She was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.

Blake continued to study families, and observed significant differences in the educational levels and the number of children graduating in large vs. small families. Children from small families did better on an array of measures that she examined. Around 1980 she began to focus on no-child and single-child families. She concluded that single children were not worse off than those from two-children families. Blake published the book Family Size and Achievement in 1989. The book won the American Sociological Association's William J. Goode Book Award in 1990. Blake was also the editor of the Annual Review of Sociology from 1992 to 1993.

Awards and honors 1990, William J. Goode Book Award, American Sociological Association

Books Family Structure in Jamaica: The Social Context of Reproduction (1961) Family Size and Achievement (1989)