Population and Family Planning

 

Population and Birth Control, 1978-1982


1979-Postdoctoral Fellow, Carolina Population Center, University of North

1982Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC


1978-Staff Research Associate, Population Information Program, The Johns

1979Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD



Selected Publications Related to Population and Family Planning


1992Family Planning in Japanese Society:  Traditional Birth Control in a Modern Urban Culture. Unrevised 2nd Edition, with new Foreword by Patricia Steinhoff.  Princeton University Press  (First edition 1983).

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/342.html


1983The Tempo of Family Formation. in Work and Lifecourse in Japan, David Plath, Editor (pp. 183-214).  Albany, NY:  SUNY Press.


1982Population.  D. Eleanor Westney and Samuel Coleman.  Major entry, Encyclopedia of Japan, Tokyo:  Kodansha.


1981The Cultural Context of Condom Use in Japan.  Studies in Family Planning 12 (1):28-39.  [Also translated into Japanese by Takashi Wagatsuma, M.D., as an information booklet published and distributed by the Japan Family Planning Association.]


1981A Cross-National Comparison of the Relative Influence of Male and Female Age on the Frequency of Marital Intercourse. Richard J, Udry, Fred R. Deven. and Samuel Coleman.  Journal of Biosocial Science 14:1-6.


1979Spermicides:  Simplicity and Safety Are Major Assets.  Samuel Coleman and Phyllis T. Piotrow.  Population Reports, Johns Hopkins University Population Information Program, Series H-5 (September).


1979Tobacco:  Hazards to Health and Human Reproduction.  Samuel Coleman, Phyllis Piotrow, and Ward Rinehart.  Population Reports, Johns Hopkins University Population Information Program, Series L-1 (March).








Sam Coleman Interviews Sam Coleman about Population and Family Planning Studies


Sam:  How did you get your first job after getting your PhD in 1978?


Sam:  I made the rounds of NGOs for population and family planning on the east coast, and Johns Hopkins was hiring.


S:  What did you do there?


S:  I was charged with researching and authoring reports on family planning methods, population and maternal child health.  The reports were distributed internationally to public health departments, physicians and nurse midwife associations around the world, both in English and in translation into several other languages.  My editor, Ward Rinehart, taught me a lot about writing.  We had to write for non-native speakers, and I’ve since realized that those approaches and skills should be transferred to writing for a domestic audience as well!  We had a great travel budget, too.  In one year I attended a WHO conference on female circumcision in the Sudan and another on barrier contraception in Guatemala City.


S:  You left Hopkins because …?


S:  I was itching to turn my doctoral dissertation on contraception and abortion in Japan into a book.  There were really attractive postdoc awards from the National Health Service available at the University of North Carolina’s Carolina Population Center in Chapel Hill, and resources there to help me prepare my manuscript for publication.  I might note that the Population Information Program was a USAID cash cow for Johns Hopkins, so we staffers weren’t really regarded as academic colleagues by the rest of the university—so scratch that job as an avenue for moving up academically into a real faculty position at that school.


S:  For my wrap-up question, what did this stage of your professional life give you, intellectually speaking?


S:  Between Hopkins and Carolina I had the chance to meet some major figures.  The Population Council’s Christopher Tietze and the Kinsey Institute’s Paul Gebhard stand out in my memory, and there’s one intellectual figure from that era in particular who I’ll never forget:  Malcolm Potts. If I teach a population or medical anthropology course I’m going to look up all of his writings.  The population dynamics I learned then could, with some updating, make up a respectable chunk of a course of sociocultural change—or social work interventions in family planning, for that matter. 


S:  I’d imagine you learned something about writing and publishing for a policy-oriented audience, too. 


S:  Thanks for pointing that out.  The review process for Population Reports was an eye-opener—a front-row seat on the politics of family planning and the dynamics of peer review.  Just a few months before I came on board at Hopkins a whole issue of Population Reports on oral contraceptives got canceled at the last minute and dumped into the shredder because half the reviewers thought it was too casual about side effects of the pill, and the other half thought it exaggerated the dangers.