Mormons & Marriage
Historically, Mormons have had higher marriage rates. Is this still true?
Introduction
This post needs no grand introduction... I was just curious about how Mormon marital status has changed compared to the US population.
Data
The data in this post is from the GSS which has data from 1978 to present. Unfortunately, due to the limited sample size of the GSS (having a few thousand respondents each wave), it can be difficult to see trends. For this chart, I combined the data by decade to try and see a trend. Each data point for mormons represent around 150-200 people, but it should be interpreted with caution as the respondents are spread out over a decade after all. The hope is that we will be able to see large shifts and trends for our question. Perhaps at a later date, I will use the CES data which has larger samples to look closer at some of these trends. However, the drawback of more recent datasets are you have a more limited view of time.
Chart
Here are my takeaways from this chart:
Overall US % married has decreased steadily since 1980 and % never married steadily increasing. This makes sense to me with more people cohabitating.
For Mormons, the each line has stayed quite flat and more or less remained unchanged the last 40 years. The Mormons today may look like over American families did 40 years ago. This is quite interesting as the US population has had many shifts on views of marriage during that this time period, but Mormons may not have been as affected or changed by these.
Compared to the US population, Mormons are more likely to be married (especially more recently) and less likely to be "never married" or "widowed/divorced/separated."
Discussion
In your opinion, why have Mormon demographics of marriage hardly changed over the last 40 years?