The data I gave is ultimately survey data, the table you post is based on marriage certificates issued. This has advantages but has one large disadvantage, namely ignoring marriages that take place overseas, while possibly counting marriages between two overseas residents that take place locally. It’s mentioned on the ‘Table 12 interpretation’ tab:
These statistics are based on marriages registered in England and Wales. Because no adjustment has been made for marriages taking place abroad, the true proportion of men and women ever married could be higher.
I followed that link to get any context on how big a deal this might be.
In 2017, an estimated 104,000 UK residents went abroad to get married and an estimated 8,000 overseas residents married in the UK.
To put that number in context, there are roughly 240k marriages per year in the UK, presumably involving around 480k people, so that’s a large chunk of the total.
I think survey data is just better for our current use case since we don’t much care about sample noise; apart from the ‘destination wedding’ issue, I definitely want to count two immigrants who arrived in the UK already married, and I think they’ll also appear in the survey but not the certificate-counting.
Thanks very much for figuring that out! I’ve retracted my original comment; my estimate of the background rate is now 30-40%ish—I think the various perturbations’ll near-enough cancel - and with that, the diff against the American rate is no longer the majority of the anomaly.
The data I gave is ultimately survey data, the table you post is based on marriage certificates issued. This has advantages but has one large disadvantage, namely ignoring marriages that take place overseas, while possibly counting marriages between two overseas residents that take place locally. It’s mentioned on the ‘Table 12 interpretation’ tab:
I followed that link to get any context on how big a deal this might be.
To put that number in context, there are roughly 240k marriages per year in the UK, presumably involving around 480k people, so that’s a large chunk of the total.
I think survey data is just better for our current use case since we don’t much care about sample noise; apart from the ‘destination wedding’ issue, I definitely want to count two immigrants who arrived in the UK already married, and I think they’ll also appear in the survey but not the certificate-counting.
Thanks very much for figuring that out! I’ve retracted my original comment; my estimate of the background rate is now 30-40%ish—I think the various perturbations’ll near-enough cancel - and with that, the diff against the American rate is no longer the majority of the anomaly.