This Analysis and Commentary was released by the Pew Research Center and written by D'Vera Cohn, Senior Writer
Imagine that you see two people in the distance walking alongside each other down a busy sidewalk. Maybe they are a couple. Maybe they just happen to be heading in the same direction. In a crowd of people on a city street, it's hard to tell.
That same challenge arises when researchers look at possible links among social, economic and demographic trends. Two trends are heading in the same direction, but are they related? Correlation, the statisticians frequently warn, is no guarantee of causation.
There is wide interest by researchers and journalists in finding data from the Census Bureau and other sources that could illustrate the impacts of the Great Recession on American life. This posting recounts a recent debate over the strength of potential links between the recent decline in marriage rates and the national economic downturn.
When the Census Bureau released its 2009 American Community Survey estimates Sept. 29, many news accounts focused on showing how the numbers illustrated the impact of the Great Recession. A number of news stories — including those in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg news service, Associated Press and AOL news — picked up on findings that for the first time, more 25-to-34-year-olds have never married than are married. Among those ages 18 and older, 52% are married, the lowest proportion since the government began collecting data on this measure more than a century ago.The numbers they cited were included in an analysis of ACS and other recent census data from the respected Population Reference Bureau in Washington. The PRB analysis noted that marriage rates among young people have been dropping for years, but the decline has accelerated since the recession began. "The data suggest that more young couples are delaying marriage or foregoing matrimony altogether, likely as an adaptive response to the economic downturn and decline in the housing market," wrote Mark Mather and Diana Lavery. PRB's analysis, however, added additional qualifications, noting that state-level patterns were murkier; rising unemployment was associated with lower marriage rates in some states but not others. (Sociologist Philip N. Cohen of the University of North Carolina also picked up on the idea that the recession "seems to be hurrying" along a decline in marriage.)
As PRB did, many journalists qualified their conclusions with phrases such as "may have had an impact" or "trend appeared to accelerate." Their headlines, as is typical in journalism, were more definitive: "Recession Spurs Young in US to Forgo or Delay Marriage," read one. "Saying No to ‘I Do,' With the Economy in Mind," said another.
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