Demographers across the nation are in an uproar after the U.S. Census Bureau announced a plan to drop seven questions from its annual American Community Survey (ASC), five of them related to marriage.
The ACS surveys more than 3 million U.S. households each year, the largest survey of its kind outside of the official U.S. Census, which is taken only once every ten years. The in-depth questionnaire asks Americans about their incomes, housing arrangements, daily commutes, relationship status, and more. The data is used to determine funding amounts for certain government programs and to identify societal trends. Outside researchers prize the survey for its rich depth of information concerning the everyday lives of Americans.
But if the Census Bureau goes ahead with its proposed plan, researchers will no longer have easy access to information about American marriages. The five marriage-related questions the Bureau plans to drop from the ACS ask whether respondents (1) got married, (2) got divorced or (3) were widowed in the past 12 months, (4) how many times they have been married, and (5) the year they last got married. (The other two questions slated for disposal ask respondents about their undergraduate major and whether they have a business on their property.)
Jim Treat, chief of the American Community Survey, told Politifact that the reason for the change wasn’t that his agency thinks marriage is unworthy of study. They just wanted to make the survey shorter, and when they polled other government agencies to determine which questions they could cut, they were told that the marriage data was the least useful to the majority of agencies.
But social demographers and pro-marriage groups are up-in-arms about the proposed change, arguing that the data on marriage is the most important demographic information in the survey because it allows researchers to analyze trends and make predictions about the state of the American family in a way that could never be duplicated by an outside group lacking the resources of the federal government.
Dr. Patrick Fagan, director of Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute, told Politifact that for the Census Bureau to stop tracking marital trends would be the same as the Labor Department cutting its measures of productivity, income, and jobs.
“It makes no sense to take away questions about the most foundational relationship out of which springs every community and society,” Fagan said. “Weakening the American Community Survey is simply bad policy and takes major real estate away from marriage and family data.”
W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, agreed that the marriage questions are invaluable.
The ACS marriage questions are “helpful in painting an accurate statistical portrait of American family life,” Wilcox told the Christian Post. “Losing them would be a tragedy.”
“The American Community Survey was a Godsend,” said population researcher Steven Ruggles of the Population Association of America in an interview with Politifact.
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“Marriage patterns are changing more rapidly than in any time in our history,” Ruggles said. “Without this data, we would have no idea that a third of the people who are 20 to 24 years old now will never get married. We wouldn’t know that divorce has surged among Baby Boomers.”
Some researchers say there’s more at stake than just a clearer picture of the state of the American marriage, though. Samir Soneji at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice warned Politifact that without the ACS marriage data, outside groups will have no way to predict when entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare might run out of funds, since their disbursement is highly dependent on recipients’ marital status.
Without the American Community Survey spousal questions, no one outside the Social Security Administration has any basis for evaluation,” Soneji said. “Without those questions, even actuaries and economists inside the Social Security Administration can only rely on speculation.”
The Census Bureau is accepting public comments on the proposal until Dec. 30. For more information, or to submit a comment, click here.