Is Marriage Making A Comeback? Kind of.

Introduction

Fewer and fewer people are taking the plunge into marriage in the US according to popular culture. The visualization below looks at what the data is saying about how many people are getting married. While the trend away from marriage is apparent, it looks like more people are starting to get married again.

Visualization

Mobile Users: If you are having issues using the interactive version of this visualization, you can find a static version of it here.

Analysis

Looking at the raw numbers and the percentage of the population that got married in the last year, it does appear that the number and proportion of people getting married is increasing. When you look at proportion of people that have never been married though, it doesn’t look like the trend is changing.
The percentage of people that have never been married continues to increase. This likely means that the number of people getting married for the first time isn’t really increasing, but instead people that have already been married are getting remarried. To confirm this though we will need to take a closer look at the data.

Data Notes

The data for this visualization comes from the American Community Survey which is completed by the US Census Bureau. The data tables where found at American Fact Finder and are found under Table B12501. The tables from 2008, the first year the data was gathered, to 2015 were used and is representative of the population that is 15 years of age and older. Excel was used to compile the data and Tableau was used to create the visualization.

A picture of the survey question has been included below.