Census Bureau decides to keep marriage questions on survey
Under pressure from academics and advocates, the U.S. Census Bureau has abandoned plans to delete a series of questions about marriage and divorce from its largest household survey.
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Under pressure from academics and advocates, the U.S. Census Bureau has abandoned plans to delete a series of questions about marriage and divorce from its largest household survey.
The U.S. Census Bureau has proposed dropping a series of questions about marriage and divorce from its largest household survey of Americans, touching off a debate about the usefulness of such data.
Same-sex marriage is now legal in Washington, D.C., and 17 states (and Arkansas will join them, if a lower-court judge’s ruling last week is upheld). Now the federal government’s task is to produce an accurate count of same-sex married couples.
This posting explores statistics about marriage rates, median age at first marriage and attitudes about marriage. Although the marriage rate is at a record low, most never-married Americans say they would like to marry. “Love” is cited more than other factors as a reason to get married, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
At the Population Association of America’s annual conference in San Francisco this week, papers on the recession’s impact on families, wealth, children, young adults, older Americans and other realms of life will be presented in at least 10 of the 200-plus sessions. Much of the research is preliminary, but it raises intriguing questions. One paper tries to assess whether the poor economy has affected divorce rates.
Barely half of all adults in the United States—a record low—are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides and grooms.
This posting discusses the challenges for the Census Bureau in counting same-sex couples, married and unmarried. The accuracy of data depends on responses in Census Bureau questionnaires and bureau procedures to collect and edit responses, and the posting describes both.
More than 2,000 demographers, sociologists and others converged on Washington, D.C., last week for the Population Association of America’s annual meeting.
According to a new Pew Research Center report on long-duration marriages and divorce, only about half the first marriages begun in the early 1970s lasted until their 25th anniversaries.
In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. Recently, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men.
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