Losing track of marriage and divorce
by Carolyn Moynihan
The US Census Bureau may drop key questions from its community survey. Experts object.
Does divorce matter? Ask the children whose loyalties and affections are torn when parents go their separate ways. Ask the woman who struggles to maintain her standard of living on a reduced income. Ask the man who has to support two households out of his income. Ask the government departments that provide social assistance to broken families. And while you are at it, ask urban planners who need to ensure there will be housing for the percentage of families that are likely to divide in two.
These are by no means all the repercussions of divorce but they are serious enough to illustrate why demographers, sociologists and economists, among others, are keenly interested in the matter. They also suggest why researchers across the political spectrum in the United States were stunned when the Census Bureau late last year proposed dropping several marriage and divorce-related questions from the American Community Survey (ACS).
Asking people whether they were married, widowed or divorced in the previous 12 months, or how many times they had been married and in what year they were last married, was an exercise of “low benefit” to other government agencies, the bureau reported. ACS office chief Jim Treat also said there was some resistance to marriage questions as something the federal government had no business asking.
Are these officials right? Does it matter if we don’t know the marriage patterns behind social trends like the wealth gap, educational failure, growth of welfare spending, crime and imprisonment rates among racial and minority groups, obesity, depression, unemployment…? And should those individuals who object to marriage questions determine federal policy?
Experts and scholars of widely differing views on marriage and family have made their views clear.
“What happens in the family does not stay in the family,” said sociologist Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and also of the Home Economics Project at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It reverberates and ripples across the entire society in economic, social and cultural ways that are important to track,” he told CNN Money.
“American families are diversifying in ways that are far more complicated than ever, creating distinct patterns in different parts of the country and subgroups of the population,” wrote Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, in a briefing paper for the left-leaning Council on Contemporary Families.
The detailed, specific data provided by the ACS on marriage and divorce was “essential in order to accurately assess everything from population growth patterns to the special educational and social needs of different neighbourhoods,” he said.
Such experts have pointed out a surprising fact: there is no national count of marriages and divorces in the US. Six states, including California, and accounting for about 20 percent of the population, are excluded from the simple tally of marriages and divorces done by the Census Bureau -- which in any case has no accompanying information about age of marriage, marriage duration or number of remarriages.
Such experts have pointed out a surprising fact: there is no national count of marriages and divorces in the US. Six states, including California, and accounting for about 20 percent of the population, are excluded from the simple tally of marriages and divorces done by the Census Bureau -- which in any case has no accompanying information about age of marriage, marriage duration or number of remarriages.
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