7 Measuring societal change

Contributor: Shannon Ang
Date: 17 September 2019

We hear various statistics that imply social change all the time. For instance, we hear that suicides are rising in Singapore, or that Singaporeans are living longer, or that the number of babies born is declining.

As always, people have many comments and theories about reasons behind what is happening. But before we can evaluate these comments, we need to first understand - what do these numbers really mean, and what kind of change is it really capturing? This case study looks at several ways we talk about societal change in public, and provides a better understanding of these commonly used numbers for higher quality discourse.