The population Research Unit is a section of the Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki in Finland. (The Department of Sociology belongs to the Faculty of Social Sciences.) The head of the Unit is professor Pekka Martikainen.
The research of the Unit deals mainly with mortality and health, marriage and family, fertility and social exclusion in urban areas. Most of the research is based on large individual-level data sets compiled in cooperation with Statistics Finland by linking records from the national population register to records from various other registers.