Judith Blake (sociologist)

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.