County-Level Marriage & Divorce Data, 1867-1987
Project Description
The National Center for Family & Marriage Research with the Center for Family & Demographic Research present county-level marriage and divorce counts for available years spanning 1867 through 1987. Not available anywhere else at this geographic level, we provide researchers with data to examine geographic concentrations of marriage and divorce for over 3,000 counties over a time span of 143 years in the United States.
Suggested Data Citation:
BGSU Marriage and Divorce Data Compass (2018). "Historical county-level marriage and divorce counts [Data File]."Retrieved from https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/original-data/county-level-marriage-divorce-data-1867-2010.html"
Funding
These data are from work supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant No. 5R03HD091474 to Wendy D. Manning at Bowling Green State University. This research was also supported in part by the Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, which has core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [P2CHD050959).
Marriage and Divorce Data Compass Crosswalk
Do you want to know if the data you are looking for is available? Check out the Data Compass Crosswalk. The Crosswalk is organized by year and indiicates the marriage and divorce measures available as well as links to the location of the data files.
Data Crosswalk
Data and Documentation
GIS Boundary Files
The county-level marriage and divorce counts along with GIS compatible boundary files and associated data notes are provided via the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS).
Machine Readable Files - Comming Soon!
The county-level marriage and divorce counts are also provided here in wide format (each year of data for a county is on one line) as a Stata file and CSV file. These data files contain the county-level number of marriages, divorces, state postal abbreviations, and unique county identifiers (county-level FIPS codes) allowing the data to be easily appended onto existing data sets.
County-level Marriage and Divorce Sources
County-level Marriage and Divorce Notes
Associated Working Papers and Publications
Westrick-Payne, K. K. (2022, February 8). A profile of national and state-level marriage rates in the U.S., 1880-2018: A research note. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4ecq7
Other NCFMR County-level Marriage and Divorce Data
Updated: 10/26/2023 01:46PM