WILL THE CENSUS BUREAU STOP COLLECTING MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE DATA?

On behalf of Askvig & Johnson, PLLP

The U.S. Census Bureau recently decided to stop asking a series of questions about marital history through its ongoing American Community Survey. A few questions that will be removed include:

·         In the past 12 months, have you been married?

·         In the past 12 months, have you been divorced?

·         In the past 12 months, have you been widowed?

·         How many times have you been married?

·         What year were you last married?

Demographers and sociologists who fought to keep these questions on the survey have argued the U.S. Census Bureau is the only reliable source of divorce rates in the United States. Upon removal, the United States will become the only country in the developed world that does not generate annual age-specific rates of marriage and divorce.

Critics have also argued that marital history questions also allow demographers to analysis divorce and marriage rates in connection with a series of economic and cultural factors, as the answers to these questions are made in conjunction with questions regarding a person's age, race, education level and income level.

Those who opposed dropping these questions from the annual survey have blamed conservative lawmakers for their removal. These politicians have argued the marital history questions are an unconstitutional breach of privacy. However as one critic has noted, "The Census Bureau targeted the questions about marriage and divorce not because people object to answering the questions posed (it turns out that they don’t), but instead because they judged the resulting data to be of little benefit, since no legislative formulas are linked directly to them." Others have argued that the Bureau wants to drop these questions because they are not used specifically for county-level, tract-level or metropolitan area analysis, but rather apply to the country as a whole.

According to a writer from the New York Times, "A briefer questionnaire may yield less political opposition."

Source: Star Tribune, "CensusBureau wants to stop collecting marriage, divorce data," Adam Belz, November 18, 2014 and AllGov, " Census Bureau Plans to Drop Marriage and Divorce Questions," Noel Brinkerhoff, January 3, 2015.