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Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English volume

Proportion remaining single

Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English vol.
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Proportion remaining single  (PROPORTION remaining single)


The prevalence of marriage in a generation of men or women is measured by the proportion never married 1. This is usually equivalent to the proportion remaining single 2 at an age such as 50 after which first marriages are rare. The proportion remaining single at each age in a cohort can be computed from first marriage probabilities 3, i.e. the proportion of single persons at exact age x who will marry before exact age x + 1, assuming that there is no mortality. For practical purposes, however, the proportion remaining single is usually obtained from census data as the proportion single 4 at that age in the corresponding cohort. When a classification of first marriages by age of the spouses is available the mean age at first marriage 5, the median age at first marriage 6 and the modal age at first marriage 7 can all be computed. In the absence of data on the timing of marriages, it is often possible to compute a singulate mean age at marriage 8 from census data on the proportions single by age. More...