Age at first marriage in the United States has increased dramatically between 1970 and 2000. This demographic phenomenon has captured the attention of academic researchers, policy makers and the media. To understand these recent changes in marriage, however, it is important to place them in a broader chronological context. This dissertation is a demographic analysis of marriage and marriage timing in the United States using census microdata from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The first half of this dissertation presents a broad overview of the demographic trends in marriage formation over the period 1850 to 2000. These chapters investigate significant racial and ethnic variations in marriage formation and compare marriage formation to other life course transitions. In the second half of the dissertation, I assess the dominant demographic theories of marriage formation, focusing particularly on the role of economic opportunity. This research highlights two key issues: the relevance of changes in women's economic opportunities in explaining changes in marriage age and the important racial and ethnic variations in marriage behavior. Demographers in recent years have dismissed the role of women's economic opportunity and have turned their attention to declines in men's economic opportunity as an explanation for the rapid increase in marriage age since 1970. I argue, however, that both male and female economic opportunity are important to understanding the dramatic fluctuations in marriage age since 1940. Social scientists have documented and analyzed the substantial differences in black and white marriage patterns in recent decades. The economic hardships of black men, in particular, are often cited to explain the differences. Scholars have spent considerably less effort, however, on other racial and ethnic variations in marriage timing and on a longer historical view of these current trends. In this dissertation I present the patterns in marriage age for whites and blacks in the twentieth century, revealing that prior to 1950, black men and women married at younger age than their white counterparts. These results, and the differences between racial and ethnic groups in recent decades, raise questions about the association between socio-economic circumstances and marriage.

The rise of cohabitation in the United States in the late twentieth century is an important component of the dramatic changes in marriage, family formation and childbearing (e.g., Bumpass, Sweet and Cherlin 1991; Bumpass and Lu 2000; Casper and Bianchi 2002; Manning 1995). This increase, first noted in the 1970s, was initially inferred from household composition because few data sources collected direct information on couples “living together” (Glick and Norton 1977, Glick and Spanier 1980). Research on cohabitation exploded in the 1980s as the trend accelerated and when longitudinal data sources, such as the National Survey of Families and Households, provided nationally representative datasets designed . . .

...This paper improves on previous attempts to infer cohabitation from the decennial census. The 1990 and 2000 censuses included specific responses for unmarried partner in the relationship question; previous censuses classified these individuals in broader partner/roommate or partner/friend categories. Our goal is to infer as best we can which individuals in the censuses of 1960 though 1980 would have described themselves as opposite sex unmarried partners if that option had been available on the census. We do this by first developing rules to identify households that are likely contain an unmarried partner, and then by applying a regression model to refine these measures...

Age at first marriage increased dramatically between 1960 and 1990, especially among blacks. The median age at first marriage among black men went from 22.5 to 28.6, and among women from 20.4 to 27.8. These increases are among the most rapid ever recoded for any historical population. Census 2000 reveals a dramatic and unexpected surprise: although median age at first marriage continued to rise for black women, it declined sharply for black men (see Figure 1). The census data indicate that black men are now marrying a year younger than black women. This paper will explore the reasons behind this unusual pattern. In particular, we will assess the effects of changing age intervals between spouses among black married couples; changing patterns of intermarriage between blacks and other racial groups; underenumeration of single black men; and changes in the income distribution of young black men.

Focuses on the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), a project to make aggregate census data accessible within a Geographic Information System framework for historical population research in the U.S. Range of technological innovations attributed to the feasibility of NHGIS; Key to the accessibility of census summary files; Work components of the project.

This new project will create two large parallel series of historical U.S. census microdata. The first is a redesigned Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) incorporating Census 2000 and the American Community Survey. The IPUMS is a compatible series of large census microdata samples spanning the period from 1850 to 2000. The second is a restricted-use micro-data archive containing 1.4 billion records from the censuses of 1940 to 2000. The new restricted-use archive is the product of a Census Bureau initiative to harmonize all of the bureau's decennial microdata and make them accessible through the Census Bureau Research Data Centers. The project will collaborate with the Census Bureau to create coding schemes to be used in both series that incorporate all detail in the restricted files. The two series will be developed simultaneously using the same software, methodology, and documentation.

This paper describes a new NSF infrastructure project to create and disseminate an integrated international census database composed of high-precision, high-density samples of individuals and households. Our project has two components. First, we propose to collect data that will support broad-based investigations into the most important scientific questions facing social and behavioral science. Second, we will create a web-based data dissemination system that will incorporate innovative capabilities for worldwide access to both metadata and microdata.