October 2009 Archives
Last week, the Pew Research Center recently released its report on marriage in America. Based on data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey for 2008, it provides a wealth of data on marriage and divorce across the 50 states. Check out the map here. Catherine Rampell provides a nice summary over at Economix.
The thing that jumped out at me was the "Larry King" statistic - the number of people who have been married three or more times.
About one-in-twenty Americans who ever have been married said they had been married three or more times. That comes to 4 million men and 4.5 million women.
States varied a lot on this. Arkansas had the highest percentage of "serial marrieds," 10 percent. This was five times more than New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts with just two percent. The study found that multiple marriages were less likely in states with high concentrations of college-educated people, and more likely in states with lower incomes and smaller college-educated populations.
Over the weekend, I enlisted my number-crunching colleague Charlotta Mellander to look at what other factors might be related to such serial marriage. We looked at unemployment, the class composition of the workforce, immigration, gay population, religion, and levels of psychological well-being. Our analysis points to associations and not causal relationships. It shows that a relationship exists, but not that one causes the other.
Class: Serial marriage was less likely in states with high creative class concentrations (a correlation coefficient of -.59). Conversely, it was was much more likely in working class states (.63). The effect of class was about the same as for income (-.58) and human capital (-.65). When we controlled for income, the association between class and marriage remained significant (-.33 for the creative class and .39 for the working class). Class appears to have a relationship to multiple marriage which is distinct from income.
Immigrants, Gays, and Bohemians: Multiple marriage was significantly less likely in states with high immigrant concentrations (-.38). Multiple marriage was also less likely in states with high bohemian concentrations (-.49). So much for the libertine bohemian lifestyle - at least when it comes to multiple marriage that is. There was no correlation between multiple marriage and the share of the gay population.
Well-Being: Multiple marriage was less likely in states with high levels of psychological well-being (-.37).
Earlier this week Catherine Rampell posted this map over at Economix. It shows the percentages of workers who drove to work alone by state and is based on U.S. Census data.
D.C. has the lowest rate - a fact which was not lost on D.C. blogging circles. NY did well too. The worst performers were Alabama, Tennessee, and Ohio, where about eight in 10 workers drive alone - more than double that of D.C.
With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we took a quick look at some factors that might be associated with this geographic pattern. It's not an exhaustive list: We examined some key economic factors like income and economic output, human capital and the creative class, and psychological ones like happiness, stress, and personality. We removed D.C. from the analysis because it was such an extreme outlier. We did not develop or run any serious multivariate analysis - just simple correlations, or associations, between variables.Still the findings point to some reasonably clear patterns.
Income and Economic Output: The richer the state, the less likely people were to drive alone. Driving alone was negatively correlated with state income levels (-.46) and output per capital (-.41).
Class and Human Capital: States with higher percentages of college graduates (-.47) and the creative class (-.43) were less likely to have people driving alone. Driving alone was much more likely in states with large working class concentrations (.62).
Professional and Creative Jobs: Driving alone was less likely in states with high concentrations of virtually every type of professional, knowledge-based and creative jobs. But it was least likely in states with large concentrations of artists, designers, and entertainers (-.63), architects and engineers (-.61), scientists (-.56 ), and lawyers (-.55).
Diversity - Immigrants and Gays: Driving alone was less likely in states with high concentrations of immigrants (-.51) and gays (-.41).
Happiness: Happiness research tells us that commuting is one of life's least pleasurable activities. Driving along was negatively associated with state levels of happiness and well-being (-.46) and positively associated with states with higher levels of stress (.29).
Personality: Psychologists identify five main personality types. Driving alone was more likely in states with high levels of three of them: extroverts (.29), conscientiousness (.36), and agreeableness (.44). Interestingly, there was no association between driving alone and the two other types - neurotic and openness to experience, which some might say makes it harder to explain New York.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but frankly I'm not convinced. You?The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation's cities since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
What determines the level of attachment people have to their communities? And how do those levels of attachment and community satisfaction affect local economies? These are big questions that cross the boundaries of urbanism, economics, sociology, and psychology. For the past several years, the Gallup Organization, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, has conducted a substantial multi-community survey called "Soul of the Community." I worked on earlier versions of the survey and reported some results in my book Who's Your City? Here's a link to the study's website.
The survey covered 14,000 Americans across the 26 Knight communities each year and asked questions about 10 key domains of community attachment: basic services like infrastructure, the economy, safety, leadership, education, aesthetics (physical beauty and green spaces), education, social offerings, openness, civic involvement, and social capital.
The newly released findings indicate that while the economic crisis is the top community concern of Americans--supplanting crime--the economic crisis did not have a significant effect on community attachment. Even though factors like jobs, economic trends, education, and basic services matter to community attachment, they are not predominant factors that matter in people's community attachment.
The top three factors were openness, social offerings, and aesthetics. Matt Thompson, who edits the Soul of the Community blog, summarized the key survey findings this way.
3. AestheticsIn each community, Gallup researchers asked residents two questions about its attractiveness - how they rated the area's parks, playgrounds, and trails, and how they rated its overall beauty and physical setting. It turns out a pretty city is a lovable city.
You might have suspected this. After all, an area's aesthetics are among the first things we talk about when we say why we love a place. Urban design has become a huge topic nationwide over the past few decades, well-reflected in the online conversation through popular sites like Inhabitat and Worldchanging. We intuitively thrill to projects like Manhattan's High Line--turning an abandoned rail line into a public park--because we recognize that these aesthetic enhancements are important for a community's well-being.
But would you have expected that our feelings about our community's aesthetics play a bigger part in our attachment to a place than public safety or highways and freeways? That surprised me, and it suggests to me that as much as we talk about urban design and green space, we might still be underestimating its impact.
2. Social offerings
It sometimes seems as though every city in America is working on a never-ending downtown revitalization project. In recent years, a lot of emphasis has been placed on creating vibrant social cores for our communities, dense places where diverse groups of people can interact. Our study suggests these efforts are valuable.Researchers asked residents questions about how fun and social their communities are-- Is there vibrant nightlife? Is it a good place to meet people and make friends? How much do residents seem to care about each other?
Responses to these questions did a lot to indicate how attached people are to where they live. I think this is especially interesting considering the study covers residents from a number of demographics, not just the young, single urbanites that we think of when we hear words like "nightlife."
To be a top-three characteristic overall, social offerings had to be important to people of a wide range of ages, marital statuses and incomes. And in fact, it's an ascendant community trait whether you're looking at a relatively older community like Bradenton, Fla., or a relatively young community like State College, Pa.--both areas where social offerings are actually the leading indicator for community attachment.
1. Openness
The number one trait we identified as decisive in determining residents' attachment to a community was openness. To get at this trait, researchers asked whether the community was a "good place for" different groups of people - senior citizens, racial and ethnic minorities, families with kids, gays and lesbians, college graduates, and immigrants from other countries.
In community after community, residents' responses to these questions told us the most about how attached they were to their community. Urban scholars such as Richard Florida have been talking for years about the economic benefits of tolerance - a community's friendliness to different groups of people. Our findings underscore the value of these characteristics and add some strong empirical weight. But this leaves me with some questions.
Openness might be the most significant trait in determining community attachment, but of all the areas researchers asked about, this is also one of the most personal and subjective. After all, civic leaders can fix up highways and freeways, create parks and bike trails, make housing more affordable, encourage the development of fun nightlife corridors, and work to lower crime - we have recognized public policy levers to address all of these community needs. But how does a community make itself more welcoming? Laws and policies can only go so far in addressing this perception.
Photo Credit: Flickr User JND90745
