Marriage and Divorce Statistics to Slowly Vanish

According to a recently released plan, the Census Bureau is proposing to eliminate questions about marriage and divorce.

Up until the mid-1990s, the federal government collated data from marriage and divorce certificates into a coherent set of statistics about marriage and divorce. However, in 1996, the National Center for Health Statistics stopped collected this data and while marriage and divorce forms were still filled out, they were not used for any statistical analysis.

Even today, states report number of marriages and divorces but provide no specific details. Many states do not keep track of how many divorces take place and that is why the divorce rate for the US may not be entirely accurate as it does not include data from major areas including California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana and Minnesota.

There are still other surveys and polls that ask people about their marital histories and status for e.g. the Survey of Income and Program Participation. However, while these may be useful, they are based on people’s memories, comprise of a small sample population and do not enable statisticians to track trends by states. In addition, they are not collected on an annual basis.

During the Bush administration, attempts were made to kill the family survey altogether but then the decision was reversed and it continued, although with a much reduced budget.

Since there is already such a void in marriage and divorce data, this recent plan of the Census Bureau will further reduce the availability of this information. The US could become the only developed country that lacks annual estimates of marriage and divorce for different age groups.

The logic behind this decision by the Census Bureau is not that people object to personal questions regarding marriage and divorce but instead because of the belief that the data is of no great benefit and there is no legal requirement to collect them.

Steven Ruggles, the incoming president of the Population Association of America, argues that cutting these data “would severely damage our ability to understand ongoing changes in American society and to implement effective policy responses.” Earlier analysis by the Census Bureau also states that “no other data sources exist that can provide the level of detail necessary to plan for and evaluate the effects of federal policies and programs related to marriage.”