Kingsley Davis

Kingsley Davis ( born August 20, 1908 in Tuxedo, Jones County, Texas, † February 27, 1997 in Stanford, California ) was an American sociologist. He is considered a classic of the population science. Davis was 49th President of the American Sociological Association.

Life and work

Davis studied English, Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts ). In 1936, he was with his work influenced by Talcott Parsons A structural analysis of kinship; prolegomena to the sociology of kinship to the Ph.D. sociology doctorate. He then taught at several U.S. universities. Since 1955 he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 1977, he taught and did research but until 1992 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

Davis conducted research on population trends in the different regions of the world. He coined the term population explosion.