“Exploring Marriage Trends: An Analysis of Age, Income, and Marital Stability in the United States”

People are getting married younger and younger these days. How are they financially stable enough to start a family at such a young age? Whether or not they are people I do or do not know the fact that I am seeing marriages, proposals, and fiancés at my age makes me feel old. I wanted to know if there is a correlation between the age at which people are getting married and how income is a factor in that marriage. This means that I am also curious if income ends up being an important factor in marriage down the line and if this income becomes an issue does that mean that inevitably the marriage turns into divorce.?

I started my data collection by using the Census API to gather all sorts of data. This data was all from 2022 and it was on the median age at which people were getting married (both for males and females) on a state level, median household income, and the total amount of divorces in each state for both males and females. I believed that I would find some sort of correlation between one of these four variables with the household income variable. My logic here was that if there were money problems within the household, that the number of divorces would increase and that couples that were more financially independent would be more capable of starting a family.

What I found was that within each of these variables, many of them did not have a large correlation. They all had R-values like 0.201(Men’s First Marriage and Median Household Income), 0.236(Womens First Marriage and Median Household), 0.078 (Men’s Divorce and Median Household Income), and 0.082 (Women’s Divorce and Median Household Income). This felt somewhat unsatisfactory to me, and I felt there should have been more to this. Here’s what one of the correlation plots looked like.

As we can see even though this is one of the higher correlations that I found and that there may have been somewhat of a weak correlation, it still was not nearly as significant as I believed that it would be. In an attempt to try and either strengthen or weaken these correlations to see if they are really significant, I added all the same data but from the years 2010 all the way to 2019. I thought that this may help clear up if there was a real relationship between any of these variables. Once the data was added I realized some significant changes. While the R-values of Men’s Divorce and Womens Divorce fell off and became very neutral, the two values for Men’s First Marriage and Womens First Marriage went up significantly. Men was 0.377 and Women was 0.376. While still relatively weak of a correlation, it is still somewhat significant.

Then if look at this graph you can see that there are a ton of points at the bottom that may be messing up the R-value. I looked at this data and realized that all those points are data that came from Puerto Rico. Knowing this I removed them from the data and the results were very interesting. The R-value went all the way up to 0.536 and had a p-value of 4.08e-43 which is also significant, so we can see that there is somewhat of a correlation. The graph also looks much better, and you can see the trend in front of your eyes. Basically, what all of this means is that the older that men are when they get married, the more money they will be making.

I felt that this was not enough for me. I wanted to see more and make more connections with this data so I decided to make an interactive scatterplot where you could look at all the Median Age of Women at their First Marriage as well as their Median household income in each state. I found a couple of interesting things within the graph. Here is my graph.

The grey dots that are clustered on the top left are all dots of Utah. I put it together eventually that this was because a lot of Mormons live in Utah and in their religion, many people tend to get married earlier. It also shows that many people in Utah have a pretty solid amount of money and are capable of sustaining a marriage. Another finding that I made was that the median age of first marriage tends to be much larger than that of men. This is not very surprising, but it was interesting to see it in data form.

This research journey uncovered certain correlations between age at marriage and income. While initial findings yielded relatively weak correlations, the further exploration over a broader timeframe revealed significant shifts, particularly emphasizing the correlation between older age at marriage for men and higher income. The interactive scatterplot provided additional insights, which showcased regional variations and cultural influences. This study underscores the intricate interplay between societal norms, economic factors, and marital decisions. There is so much more to explore regarding marriage in America and there are so many untold stories to find. To expand on this data, I now want to dive into some new variables that are inside the census data about marriage and see if I can garner a deeper understanding for what it means to be “married” in the United States.

With no data to back it up, I have felt that the idea of marriage and love has been slowly dying. People seem to be okay living the single life and more and more people are not happy in their marriages which inevitably leads to divorce. My “hypothesis” for this study is that the number of divorces will be slowly rising throughout the census data and that less people will be getting married, and more people will be single. The reason that I put hypothesis in quotes is because this is just a basic question that I want to solve, it is not a very concrete idea or plan.

The new data that I had to find to be able to do this analysis has a lot to do with certain types of marital status. I will continue using divorces in the last year, men and women who are married, individuals who have never been married, and people who are not married (in the given year). These variables will likely allow me to find some sort of trends and patterns that may give evidence to my thoughts and “hypothesis”. To start I had a couple ideas of how I may be able to visualize my hypothesis. The first, which may have not solved anything but was that I could use Altair and look at each states divorce and marriage numbers and see which states were the most successful and unsuccessful with marriage. For some reason Altair was being “dysfunctional” with my data and I could not figure out why it was not working. So instead, I made a quick bar chart looking at each state’s total average divorce per year and while it was fun to see which states had the faultiest marriages it was not really going to help me understand if the concept of love and marriage was failing.

So, to start I looked at the number of married males and married females over the years to see if the numbers had decline like I believe that they would. What I found was quite uninteresting, because there was almost no change in the number of marriages from 2009 to 2022. Most of the time more men were getting married but at the same time women were right behind them, leaving not much to be seen.

There had to be a better way to see if marriages were failing. I felt that there are so many people nowadays who live the single life, which would obviously keep them away from a relationship even getting married in the first place. So, with that being said, I then compared men and women who are not married through the years to see if maybe the number of single people was rising. I found that it is rising and that there are many individuals who are not in marriages. What shocked me the most about this is that there are way more females than males in this data and which does not make that much sense. Also, a potential outlier that is messing with the data could be the fact that the population keeps rising, so maybe this is showing that there are more people just in the U.S.

I needed more answers, it felt like this data was taking me nowhere and that maybe there is no evidence behind the claims that I thought may be true. I decided that maybe an overtime line graph, looking at divorce and total marriages would help me indicate if there were any trends emerging. What I found was that a majority if the time there is about ½ as many divorces happening in comparison to marriages. That feels significant to me, despite looking at the chart, which makes it seem as if the number of marriages is so much more compared to divorces. I think the fact that about half of marriages are failing and resulting in divorce is quite a staggering fact, especially because marriage is supposed to be so powerful and structurally sound. I also wanted to look at the number of successful marriages and this turned out to be that since 2014, the number of people who are staying married is larger than the amount of people getting divorced so that feels like quite a positive for the status of marriage as a concept.

I think that there is still so much exploration that could be done within this data, one idea being to look at the duration of marriages and see if those numbers are slowly going down, but to conclude my findings I would say that it was somewhat indecisive. While I did see that 50% of marriages are failing, there is a slow decline in the number of total divorces and more and more marriages are succeeding or in other words people are staying together. I hope that I find more time to dive deeper into this because marriage is such a crucial part of American culture and checking if it is working can help answer questions about the U.S as a whole.