Does declining marriage explain rising suicide rates for old men, too? (Trick question.)

The reason it’s a trick question is that, for older men suicide rates aren’t rising—even though their marriage rates are falling. This doesn’t fit the religious conservative story spun by Brad Wilcox here at The Atlantic and broadcast by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

The government reported this month that the suicide rate for adults ages 35 to 64 increased 28 percent from 1999 to 2010. That’s a serious problem. Oddly, though, the report didn’t include data on those over age 64 or under 35. Why? Because the rates didn’t change significantly for those groups. That’s a fine reason for the report to focus on the other groups, but the pontificators shouldn’t let that blind them to the overall story (and longer trends).

The suicide rate for people age 65-plus dropped 5.9 percent during that period, but that was significant only at the 9 percent confidence level. In the longer run, though, the drop in suicide rates for older people is certainly significant. Here is the trend from 1991 to 2009 for men, by age:

From 1991 to 2009, the suicide rate among older men dropped more than 25 percent, from 40 to 29 per 100,000 people. During that time, suicide for middle-aged men dropped and then rose again, ending up within a point of where it started the period. So the two-decade story is not one of increasing middle-aged male suicide (at least not yet). And, of course, during that time marriage dropped for all three groups.

Source: Current Population Surveydata from IPUMS.

So who would tell a story of declining marriage causing increasing suicide? Christian conservatives promoting marriage and religion (among others). Douthat quoted Wilcox’s story and summarized:

That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

If he’d looked at the larger trend by age, maybe he wouldn’t have written his next paragraph:

The hard question facing 21st-century America is whether this retreat from community can reverse itself, or whether an aging society dealing with structural unemployment and declining birth and marriage rates is simply destined to leave more people disconnected, anxious and alone.

For some reason our seniors just aren’t getting the pro-suicide message, so they’re not part of the story. In fact, neither are the 31 out of 35 wealthy countries that have seen falling suicide rates in the last several decades, even though every one has had falling marriage rates for decades.

Why not? Let me look more closely at that older age group of men, breaking them down into the younger-old (65-74) and the older-old (75-plus). The trend is clear for this group that has seen falling suicide rates: less marriage, more employment.

Douthat and Wilcox could have said, “We love marriage, but in this case it looks like declining marriage isn’t causing a big problem.” But why should they? They have their story and they’re sticking to it.

Of course, no sociologist is going to deny that married men usually have lower suicide rates—and I’ve written about it myself. But for older men, at least, that doesn’t seem to be driving the trend for the last several decades. Rising employment rates are a good place to start for explaining declining suicide. And falling marriage—if it has been had an opposing effect—hasn’t been as important.

Marriage is going down, so what does Kanye West have to do with it?

The marriage rate has fallen almost continuously for more than half a century, from a sky-high 90 per 1,000 unmarried women in 1950 (meaning almost 1 in 10 single women got married that year) to a bare 31 per 1,000 in 2011. Splashdown appears imminent.

Sources: 1940-1960; 1970-2011.

Social scientists understand that there is a combination of demographic, economic, policy, and cultural factors involved. These include the aging population, men’s declining fortunes, the incarceration of millions of poor men, the rise of secular ideology and the sexual revolution.

Often, however, cultural influence is left to what you might call residual interpretation. Proving that culture affects demographic trends is difficult. Instead, people consider how demographic, economic and policy factors play their roles, and then attribute what’s left of the trend to culture.

Recently, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green University reported the marriage rate for each state and D.C., ranging from 61 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women in Utah down to 19 per 1,000 in Washington, D.C. and 20 in Rhode Island. To explain the pattern using normal demographic practices, I gathered some other data about states from the Census Bureau: The percent of the population over 65, percent female, percent with a BA or higher education, population density, per capita income and race/ethnic composition. With that information – using a regression – I can guess the marriage rate to within 3.1 points on average. This is what the regression looks like, showing what happens when I start with age and sex composition, add income and education, and then add race/ethnicity:

In statistical terms (R²), my simple model explains 73 percent of the variation in marriage rates, which is pretty good. Before I would use the marriage rate as an indicator of something like “culture,” then, I would say most of what’s going on reflects larger demographic and economic patterns that we more or less understand. The differences that remain, however, still might be the result of cultural, religious, or attitudinal factors that are harder to assess. (I stress this is not about low Black marriage rates: note the population percentage Black has no effect once the other factors are controlled.)

Culture, meet big data

What about big data, the billions of bits of information people leave strewn around wherever they go? Marketers and government spying agencies make most of the headlines, but social scientists, too, are scraping up millions of words and turning them into analyzable numbers, so they can tell you things like:

• Which words are most closely associated with men versus women in the New York Times? Men: prime, baseball, official, capital, governor. Women: pregnant, husband, suffrage, breast, gender.
• Do whites do more racist Google searches in states with larger black populations? Yes, fitting a longstanding pattern of racism flaring up in places with greater minority representation.
• Did Obama crush Romney in states where people search for Top Chef? (Obviously.)
• For many others, follow the Google tag.

One of the easiest sources to use for this kind of thing is the Google Correlate tool, which finds the search terms whose frequency most closely follows a specified pattern. I entered the marriage rate for each state, shown on the map on the left, with darker green indicating higher marriage rates. Google Correlate tells me which searches track this variation: which searches are most popular in Utah, least popular in D.C., and so on. (I actually trimmed the Utah rate to it wouldn’t be such an outlier, from 61 down to 57, just above the next highest). It turns out the most correlated search is for “rolls recipe,” which is correlated with the marriage rate at .85 on a scale of -1 to 1.

But since my interest is in the decline of marriage, I multiplied the marriage rate by -1 and tried again (so now darker green indicates a lower marriage rate). The answer, overwhelmingly: Kanye West. (Experts at finding any website anywhere will know that he’s a never-married proud father-to-be with co-parent Kim Kardashian.)

That correlation between the inverse of the 2011 marriage rate and “kanye west my beautiful dark twisted fantasy” (his last album) is .81. Further, Google produces the top 100 most correlated searches, and of those, no fewer than 28 were about Kanye West (such as “kanye west new album,” “devil in a new dress lyrics” and “air yeezys”). Another 16 were other hip-hop searches, including some about Jay Z and Lil Wayne. Other apparent themes include mafia-related entertainment (“sopranos episode,” “pacino movies,” “corleone”) Sex and the City, and shopping at Marshalls.

Does this tell us more than the simple demographic analysis I did above? When I put the top Kanye search into my model, it has the strongest effect, and the variance explained jumps to 81 percent. The model now can predict the marriage rate to within 2.5 points on average.  It’s a very good predictor, and it’s not just reflecting simple demographics like age, gender and race. Whether Kanye is in the analysis or not, Black population percentage has no effect on this prediction. Here is the regression, with new parts in red:

Explanations

So, I dredged all the search data in the world for something correlated with marriage rates, and found something. But what does it mean? Two cautionary stories are revealing. Forecasting guru Nate Silver has a good description of how noise looks like signal. For example, with the tens of thousands of economic statistics available to build a forecasting model, finding a pattern after the fact is deceptively easy. But it usually doesn’t work for predicting future economic trends.

Another caution comes from genomic studies. In a study of, say, cancer genetics, statisticians may conduct millions of tests for the association between any genetic variant and the occurrence of cancer. With the typical definition of “statistical significance” – which tolerates a 5 percent random chance of being wrong – that means they’d find hundreds of thousands of bogus “significant” associations. So good scientists set their significance threshold for such studies much tighter, more like.00005 percent than 5 percent. That way they are sure to only blow the whistle on genes if the chances of being wrong are vanishingly small.

So, this is a suggestive game of Big-Data Craps, not real research. It’s meant to provoke a little. I hope we’ll think creatively about new kinds of data we can use. Also, I want to generate ideas about cultural explanations for demographic trends. It should be at least as useful as some pundit simply declaring, for example, that gay marriage is killing real marriage. (“As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward,” wrote Ross Douthat, “the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before.” That theory has about as much going for it as one linking the decline of marriage to the rise of high fructose corn syrup or the explosion of red cards in World Cup soccer.)

Kanye’s fantasy

With those caveats, here are three possible explanations for the finding:

1. Google, by trawling through millions of search term patterns, has come up with a random bit of noise that just happened to catch my attention. There’s nothing there, really.
2. The hip-hop Google search is capturing a more finely-grained demographic pattern than I did with my simple Census numbers. So what matters for marriage is not just things like the percentage female, education levels and racial composition of the population, but the presence of particular combinations of these demographic groups. Hip hop’s audience is notoriously difficult to define — it’s featured on top-five radio stations in markets such as San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as Detroit and Atlanta — but it’s certainly not as simple as age, gender, and race
3. Hip-hop actually is weakening marriage in America. People who listen to Kanye West and other hip-hop music are taken in by the music’s consumerist individualism and shun marriage, with its staid image of tradition, conformity and restraint. As a result, they are less likely to get married than the people Googling “rolls recipe.”

I lean toward explanation #2. Explanation #3 might have something to it. As the philosopher xkcd wrote, “correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’” But I wouldn’t draw that conclusion without a lot more evidence, including doing some comparisons to other cultural factors, like other kinds of music or religious patterns. Since I have no expertise in hip hop (post 1989), I would be glad to hear from people who know about it for realz.

Addendum: Here’s a scattergram showing the correlations between some of the variables in the regression. In each cell there’s a dot for every state plus DC. The Kanye variable is scaled (by Google) to have a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1 (click to enlarge).

Be a man, a Morehouse Man — and treat your boyfriend right

I’m sure other people will have more insightful things to say about Obama’s speech to Morehouse College’s graduation today [official transcript here, one copy of the video here]. But let me just point out the juxtaposition of what seemed like serious heteronormativity with whatever the opposite of heteronormativity is.

He opened with jokes about the rain, including this:

I see some moms and grandmas here, aunts, in their Sunday best — although they are upset about their hair getting messed up.

And he gave several references to what it is to “be a man” — such as, “a family man, and a working man, and a Morehouse Man,” and, referencing previous Morehouse graduates…

…what it means to be a man — to serve your city like Maynard Jackson; to shape the culture like Spike Lee; to be like Chester Davenport, one of the first people to integrate the University of Georgia Law School.

And then there was this:

Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man. Be the best husband to your wife, or your boyfriend or your partner [some response, and he wags his finger at them.] Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.

That’s my transcription from the video at 22:17. For whatever reason, this passage has been transcribed incorrectly by some people. The White House website quotes it as:

Be the best husband to your wife, or you’re your boyfriend, or your partner.

While USA Today had it as:

“Be the best husband to your wife, or boyfriend to your partner.”

Anyway, he also had an interesting passage on what it means to be an outsider in America:

As Morehouse Men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider; know what it’s like to be marginalized; know what it’s like to feel the sting of discrimination. And that’s an experience that a lot of Americans share. Hispanic Americans know that feeling when somebody asks them where they come from or tell them to go back. Gay and lesbian Americans feel it when a stranger passes judgment on their parenting skills or the love that they share. Muslim Americans feel it when they’re stared at with suspicion because of their faith. Any woman who knows the injustice of earning less pay for doing the same work — she knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. So your experiences give you special insight that today’s leaders need.

Including “gay and lesbian Americans” in that list of outsiders isn’t shocking anymore. But I was intrigued by his reference to “parenting skills.” Could it be a nod to the Regnerus affair, in which the parenting outcomes of gays and lesbians were at issue?

Letter to graduate students: Broaden yourself

Here is my (first) annual letter to graduate students, just published in Imagine, the Maryland sociology department newsletter.

In the Graduate Director’s office I see a little bit of everything. Fortunately, it is more good than bad: students winning awards, publishing their work, getting grants and fellowships, and finishing their degrees. Of course, I also see some of the downsides, such as students having a hard time with their coursework or funding, or struggling to attain a foothold in the long climb that is a dissertation.

In the process of receiving all of this news and making the small decisions of the day, I look for opportunities to give advice on more general topics as well. (Stop by and let me bore you with some today!) Here’s one piece of advice I have felt the need to deliver lately: broaden yourself.From the first classical theory course and survey methods seminar to the completion of a dissertation, graduate school seems like a journey into extreme specialization. And there is something to that. Developing an expertise sufficient to make a unique scholarly contribution does require concentration in a particular area of the field, always to the exclusion of other things. But this is not a linear trend. In fact, our program is designed to encourage broad exploration as well, requiring three courses in each of two specialty areas before the comprehensive exams.

It seems obvious, but bears repeating, that the best specialists are those who see their specialization as part of the bigger picture. The very act of identifying a narrow interest, and placing it in the proper context – if it is to be successful, and useful – requires broad understanding of the social context surrounding the substantive subject of the work. So breadth itself is an important value.

Beyond breadth, knowledge diversity is vital as well. That is, it is valuable not just to know about your own subject and the surrounding research, but also to dive deeply into other more narrow areas as well. To choose an analogy, athletes who specialize in tennis benefit from broadly conditioning their entire bodies. But they may also benefit – in tennis and in their other pursuits – from developing a high level of skill in a specific other sport, such as swimming or ping-pong. The insights from gaining deep understanding in an area removed from one’s own primary research are not easy to identify in advance, but when such understanding is pursued with an open mind they are inevitable.

So, yes, I am suggesting that you do more work, beyond what is required for today’s project, this year’s comprehensive exam, or even your dissertation. Easier said than done! But that doesn’t mean it’s not good advice. I hope it will serve you well.

Best wishes to all of our students for an enjoyable and productive summer.

Mary free fall continues

For the past two years I’ve been tracking the fate of the name Mary as given to girls born in the U.S., spurred by the observation that Mary was no longer in the top 100 names, after an unparalleled run at #1 that lasted for all but six years of recorded history.

It’s a difficult job, but it’s got to be done. (Follow the Mary tag for historical background, examples, and more figures.)

So: 2012 was another rough year, according to data from the Social Security Administration.

There was another 5% drop in the number of Marys born, and as a result Mary fell a record 11 ranks, from 112 to 123. The 2,535 Marys born in 2012 were a mere 0.13% of the 1.9 million girls recorded born. Once upon a time, in 1880, more than 7% of all girls born were named Mary.

Part of the point of the Mary name project is to show the predictability of (much) human behavior, even including rare events, such as naming girls Mary. I have a simple model which predicts that the number of girls named Mary will decline at a rate equal to the average decline over the previous five years — what falls continues to fall. This year, out of 1.9 million girls born and 2,535 named Mary, my model was off by a microscopic 79 girls. The model predicted the number of Marys to within 3.2%.

Take that, indeterminancy, free will, or postmodernism (your pick).

P.S. Despite the continued free fall of Mary, my model missed low, incidentally — or, Mary-naming Americans beat expectations by 3.2%. Since my Mary post on the Atlantic site last December was shared more than 5,000 times, unless proven otherwise we have to assume the 79-girl bump was a Mary-name-blog effect. (File under reflexivity.)

ADDENDUM: MARIA

By request, here is the trend for Maria. It is not the case that Maria is replacing Mary — both are trouble. In fact, with Maria falling steeply in the last decade, she has also dropped out of the top 100 for the first time since 1943!

Speculation: As Marias of Latina origin grow more common, perhaps their increase is not enough to compensate for the resulting perception among non-Latinas that Maria is a Spanish name. (Remember, this is just girls born in the U.S.)

Intersectionality interrupted

When I was in college a lot of people were reading Black Feminist Thought, by the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, which came out in 1990 (it’s now pushing 11,000 citations in Google Scholar, and Prof. Collins is a colleague in my department). That book helped popularize intersectionality, from the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar.

Thinking about and acting on intersecting inequalities was a big issue in the 1990s. It motivated me to do my only research on social movements (the women’s suffrage movement), as well as my dissertation, which included an article on the intersection of race, class and gender in U.S. labor markets (related to work my advisor Reeve Vanneman and colleagues were doing back then).

Signs

Anyways, long story short: I was interested to see that the latest edition of the journal Signs (paywalled) is devoted to intersectionality, or the critical analysis of how different kinds of inequality and identity occur simultaneously. I haven’t kept up with the theoretical side of this work, which has drifted away from the statistical modeling vein we were mining.

First I read the essay by Catharine MacKinnon, whose work I’ve been teaching for years in courses on gender, theory, and inequality. Since I last paid attention, she did a lot of work on women and international law, and in the essay here she discusses rape and genocide in the Balkan wars. Just as she once asked some feminists (paraphrasing), “if rape is about violence and not sex, why doesn’t he just hit her?”, she now asks (paraphrasing), “if genocide is about wiping people out, why do they commit mass rape against women instead of just killing them?” Thanks in part to her legal and theoretical work, the idea of genocide as a national, racial or ethnic crime is linked to sex-based atrocities such as forced prostitution and impregnation.

Although it’s hard to read, I am a sucker for MacKinnon’s wordplay (and always hear her phrase, “Man fucks woman; subject verb object,” when I talk about subjects and objects). So I was drawn in by her introduction to intersectionality as a method, which included, “Talking about thinking about the way one thinks is complicated, in that one is doing what one is talking about doing at the same time one is talking about doing it.”

For example, as we think about how we think, she wants us to avoid confusing the products of inequality for their causes. She writes,

No question about it, categories and stereotypes and classifications are authentic instruments of inequality. And they are static and hard to move. But they are the ossified outcomes of the dynamic intersection of multiple hierarchies, not the dynamic that creates them. They are there, but they are not the reason they are there.

Anyway, I recommend the essay, which, in addition to rape and genocide, also discusses the conundrums of intersecting inequality in U.S. law, where race and gender discrimination each are illegal, but discrimination by race-and-gender simultaneously is somehow sometimes left out.

That last point draws heavily off the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who, along with Sumi Cho and Leslie McCall, guest-edited the special issue.

Interruption

And here, after recommending the issue and praising its authors, I offer a criticism: intersectionality has a writing situation. Everyone in academia has their jargon. But in this area there is a common aesthetic preference for extra words and clauses — including long words and clauses — that is a real barrier to entry for those who don’t spend a lot of their time reading it.

Here is the opening paragraph of the introductory essay, by the guest editors:

As intersectionality has emerged in a number of discursive spaces, the projects and debates that have accompanied its travel have converged into a burgeoning field of intersectional studies. This field can be usefully framed as representing three loosely defined sets of engagements: the first consisting of applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics, the second consisting of discursive debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm, and the third consisting of political interventions employing an intersectional lens.

That’s 86 words. I think not much would be lost cutting it down to 42 words, like this:

In the growing field of intersectional studies, we identify three categories of work. First, there are applications of the intersectional framework and studies of intersecting inequalities. Second, there are debates about intersectionality itself as a paradigm. And third, there are intersectional politics.

That’s just an example chosen for convenience — there are worse and better passages in the various essays, and I don’t want to belabor it. I suspect that to many outsiders this problem seems obvious, but I don’t know how these writers see it. I think academics should try to say what they want to say as clearly and directly as possible. If this principle were directly weighed against the loss of nuance — and aesthetic satisfaction — it might entail, I hope the balance would tip in the direction of readability.

Homogamy tipping point update: between elections edition

After the last election I described the trend toward legal homogamy as taking a tipping point shape. Not a media-hype tipping point that’s really just a milestone or watershed (like the arbitrary 50%), but a bona fide straw-that-breaks-the camel’s-back shape – that is, an exponential trend.

The between-election update shows us continuing on that trend, with Rhode Island and now Delaware falling on the line. Here I’ve plotted the percent of the population living under a post-homogamy state regime, and the number of states (including DC):

Even assuming they don’t legalize it nationally, if the Supreme Court lets California’s homogamy law stand after all this graph will go through the proverbial roof.

On the other hand, of course, the future is not yet determined. We won’t know till it happens what happened. In that I must agree with the Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation and National Organization for Marriage, who write in a recent pamphlet:

Q: Isn’t same-sex marriage inevitable?
A: No.

(I disagree with the rest of the pamphlet.)