Comments on: Know your (marital) status

By: James Thorpe

James Thorpe — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:59:25 +0000

@Robert
At first read, I thought you meant that 10% of the white male population had an interracial marriage which was confusing the statistics 😉

By: David Kirk

David Kirk — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:16:43 +0000

In reply to Kettie.

Census data isn’t really the ideal thing to work with here. Am still playing around with some other modelling, with generally poor results, trying to understand rates of marriage and divorce from this data. As you describe, this just reflects the proportion of people saying they’re currently divorced. All the remarriages are removed from the divorced pool. Also consider that this is self-reported census data, not linked to actual records. I suspect people aren’t queuing up to falsely say they are divorced, but there will be those who prefer not to say they’re divorced so the stats are possibly skewed a little.

Nothing in the census data about number of marriages. Will post again soon with the disappointingly confusing results of my other analysis and modelling.

By: David Kirk

David Kirk — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:14:13 +0000

In reply to Robert. I blame MS standard themes in office. Gonna do a little more work with this data so will take a look at male/female differences.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 13:21:56 +0000

Nice article David.
It would be interesting to compare the statistics for men vs women in the different categories…
Also, please consider the 10% of the white male population that is colour-blind and avoid those hard to discern gradients 😉

By: Kettie

Kettie — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 13:00:27 +0000

Interesting! Divorce rates seem to paint a rosier picture than women’s magazines would have us believe. Although I suppose the married group includes re-marriages so that’s not necessarily true. Any info available on number of marriages?