Demographic data or demographics is used to describe a chosen population characteristics as used opinion research, marketing or in government.
They can be demographic profiles that are used in the research as well. Some of the commonly used demographics include mobility, race, income and age, home ownership, location, educational, attainment and disabilities.
Psychographics push the idea further by including people’s behaviors as well as their lifestyles. Some examples of this are where people like to go on vacation, their values, their behavior as well as their interests. The way values are distributed in a certain demographic variable and in households are both trendwise and interest wise over time. Demographics are commonly used in marketing research as well as in economic research.
Although demographic profiling basically entails the making of generalizations about people, it is not a guarantee that everyone will conform to the profile that has been put in place. One should however remember that Demographics is probabilistic and aggregate information of groups and is not about the individual person.
People who are not for the demographics concept argue that the broad–brush generalizations only offer limited insight and hence their practical usefulness is matter of debate. However, it is important to note that if one’s conclusions are drawn statistically in a valid manner and are reproducible as well, the criticisms do not hold water.