Age at First Marriage for Women

an exploratory data analysis

The data

This data was extracted from https://www.gapminder.org/data/. It containes the average age, in years, of first marriage for women. Women who never married are excluded.

I examined the data from 2005. There are 175 countries with data from this year. The continent in which each country resided was added manually by me.

Histogram of Age at First Marriage for Women in 2005

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##   17.60   21.80   23.57   24.53   27.35   33.27      10

Faceting by continent

This is what we encounter by faceting for continents:

The peak for Africa and Europe look quite different, right? Let’s see it numerically:

by(marriage$X2005, marriage$continent, summary)
## marriage$continent: Africa
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##   17.60   19.85   21.31   22.03   22.67   29.60       5 
## -------------------------------------------------------- 
## marriage$continent: America
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##   20.35   22.59   23.37   25.48   28.85   33.27       2 
## -------------------------------------------------------- 
## marriage$continent: Asia
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##   17.84   22.12   23.34   23.54   25.23   28.62       2 
## -------------------------------------------------------- 
## marriage$continent: Europe
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##   20.87   25.46   27.73   27.52   30.25   32.40       1 
## -------------------------------------------------------- 
## marriage$continent: Oceania
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   20.80   22.75   24.36   25.50   29.40   30.37

Indeed, we find out that Europe shows the highest age at first marriage median (~27.7 years) and Africa the lowest (~21.3).