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\u2019s hard to tell.<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
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. \u00a0This posting recounts a recent debate over the strength of potential links between the recent decline in marriage rates and the national economic downturn.<\/p>\n\n
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> A number of news stories\u2014including those in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>, USA Today<\/em><\/a>, Bloomberg<\/a> news service, Associated Press and AOL<\/a> news\u2014picked 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.<\/p>\n\n The numbers they cited were included in an analysis of ACS and other recent census data from the respected Population Reference Bureau<\/a> 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. \u201cThe 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,\u201d wrote Mark Mather and Diana Lavery. PRB\u2019s 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 \u201cseems to be hurrying\u201d along a decline in marriage<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n As PRB did, many journalists qualified their conclusions with phrases such as \u201cmay have had an impact\u201d or \u201ctrend appeared to accelerate.\u201d Their headlines, as is typical in journalism, were more definitive: \u201cRecession Spurs Young in US to Forgo or Delay Marriage,\u201d read one. \u201cSaying No to \u2018I Do,\u2019 With the Economy in Mind,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n\n Census Director Weighs In<\/strong><\/p>\n\n A few days later, Census Bureau Director Robert Groves, who had a long career as a social scientist before taking over the agency in 2009, contributed his thoughts. On his director\u2019s blog<\/a>, he noted that some news coverage had stated that the declining number of marriages in the U.S. was directly related to the economic downturn. That inference may not be valid, Groves said, and more information may be needed to make the assertion.<\/p>\n\n Many factors can affect the number of marriages, he said, and pointed out, as did the PRB report, \u00a0that the share of Americans who are currently married has been dropping for decades. (So did this blog posting on the Cincinnati Enquirer website<\/a>, written by Janet Harrah of Northern Kentucky University. Its title: \u201cStatistics: A Cautionary Tale.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n \u201cThe impact of an external event, such as an economic recession, can\u2019t easily be teased out of the change over time,\u201d Groves wrote. \u201cIt would be useful to such inference to see whether persons considering marriage before and after the recession were making different decisions. It would be useful to know whether those couples most affected by the recession (e.g., losing a job, having a home foreclosed), were more prone to put off marriage relative to those unaffected by the recession. But these estimates were not part of the ACS report.<\/p>\n\n Statistical estimates are critical to understanding our nation, who we are and how we live. We just need to take care that we understand what they can and cannot tell us about our country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Other Evidence, Another View<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Economist Justin Wolfers added his views last week, with an op-ed in The New York Times<\/a>, a posting on the paper\u2019s Freakonomics blog<\/a> and an essay<\/a> on the Brookings Institution website.<\/p>\n\n He wrote: \u201cYou\u2019ve probably heard the\u00a0latest marriage narrative<\/a>: With the recession upon us, young lovers can\u2019t afford to marry.\u00a0 As appealing as this story is, it has one problem: It\u2019s not true.\u201d There is no systematic pattern to marriage rates and the economy, he argues: \u201cIn fact, the marriage rate appears amazingly insensitive to the business cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n