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1 1 (July 7, 2022)

handle is hein.amenin/aeiaejt0001 and id is 1 raw text is: DATA TOOLS 2. A New Variable for Classifying Marital Status in the American Community Survey Charles Murray American Enterprise Institute July 2022 Marital status is a standard variable for many social policy analyses. A person's marital status provides crucial information about his or her position in a community and is an important data point for interpreting other information (e.g., family income). Parents' marital status when children are growing up is an essential independent variable in analyzing the children's life outcomes as children, adolescents, and adults. Other issues about marriage are central to understanding where the culture is headed. At what age are people marrying? Having children? How do two-income marriages compare to one- income marriages? Is assortative mating-the tendency of people to marry others with similar intelligence, education, or economic status-high or low? Increasing, holding steady, or decreasing? All these analyses are affected by the precision that can be brought to the classification of marital status. Presenting ALTMARST In the American Community Survey (ACS), marital status is reported in the variable named MARST. It has six categories: married with spouse present, married with spouse absent, separated, divorced, widowed, and never married. Over the past few decades, these six categories have been complicated by the increasing prevalence of cohabitation rather than formal marriage and more recently by the advent of same-sex marriage. This second entry in my series, Data Tools, presents a new variable, ALTMARST, that discriminates between marriage and cohabitation and between cross-sex partners and same-sex partners. 1

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