Family, Race, Religion: The US Is Becoming More Diverse

February 26th, 2013 by Guest Contributor

The last one is a little tricky. It’s common to report that the median age at marriage has increased since the 1950s (having fallen before the 1950s). But I realized it’s not just the average increasing, but the dispersion: More people marrying at different ages. So the experience of marriage is not just shifting rightward on the age distribution, but spreading out. Here’s another view of the same data:

I calculated these using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1968 (for those married in the years 1950-1968) and comparing it with the 2011 American Community Survey for those married in the previous year. There might be a better way, of course.

I have complained before that using the 1950s or thereabouts as a benchmark is misleading because it was an unusual period, marked by high conformity, especially with regard to family matters. But it is still the case that since then diversity on a number of important measures has increased. Over the period of several generations, in important ways the people we randomly encounter are more likely to be different from ourselves (and each other).

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

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Posted in diversity, religion | 2 comments

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Rob

Out of curiosity, what was your rationale for excluding people with no religion? [For graph #2]
pietrocrazy

Is it really fair to count Catholics and Protestants as separate religions? The US would be a lot less religiously diverse if we took into account the fact that almost everyone (except perhaps a few nuts) consider Catholics and Protestants to be two sects of Christianity, not two different religions.