ABSTRACT
In this chapter we turn to analyse marriage. Although marriage is not one of the basic components of demographic change listed in Chapter 1, there are good reasons why demographers consider the analysis of marriage patterns important. The principal of these is that marital status is one of the most important sources of population heterogeneity: people may be classified as single (that is, never married), married, divorced or widowed, and the behaviour of these marital statuses with respect to the basic components of population change is very different. This is most obviously seen in relation to fertility. The fertility of currently married women is usually much greater than the fertility of women in other marital statuses. Indeed, in some populations, fertility is principally determined by the proportion of the female population that is married — this was notably the case in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989). Marital status also affects mortality: typically the mortality of married persons is lower than that of unmarried persons, after controlling for age compositional differences (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1987a).
