The Continuing Retreat of Marriage: Figures from Marital Status Life Tables for United States Females, 2000–2005 and 2005–2010

Robert Schoen ()
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Robert Schoen: Pennsylvania State University, Population Research Institute

Chapter Chapter 10 in Dynamic Demographic Analysis, 2016, pp 203-215 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The lack of vital statistics data on American marriage and divorce has made it difficult to follow post-1995 changes in marriage behavior. Here, a new approach, Rate Estimation from Adjacent Populations (REAP), is used in conjunction with vital statistics mortality data and recently released divorce data from the American Community Survey to construct marital status life tables that reflect the lifetime implications of observed or inferred rates of marriage, divorce, and mortality. Methodologically, the chapter sets forth the features of the REAP approach. Substantively, the analysis shows that the retreat from marriage is continuing, but unevenly. The probability that a woman ever marries has fallen to 80 %, and the average age at first marriage has risen, slightly, to 27 years. At the same time, the probability of divorce appears to be holding steady at about 43–46 %. The results suggest that the great transformation of the American family has not yet run its course.

Keywords: Marital-status life-tables; Divorce probability; Proportion ever-marrying; Marriage age; Sequential cross-sections; Rate estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssdmcp:978-3-319-26603-9_10

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-26603-9_10

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