County-Level Marriage and Divorce Data, United States, 2011-2019 (ICPSR 39568)
Version Date: Oct 29, 2025 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Krista K. Westrick-Payne, Bowling Green State University
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR39568.v1
Version V1
Summary View help for Summary
Contemporary local level marriage and divorce administrative data are not readily available. This can limit understanding of geographic variation in marriage and divorce, particularly for areas with small populations. There is no centralized location or agency responsible for providing administrative data on marriage and divorce at the local level. This project amassed, assembled, and cleaned administrative marriage and divorce counts, including counts of same-sex marriages, providing the first and only documentation of administrative data on same-sex marriages. Data have been harmonized spatiotemporally in a format to aid researchers in linking marriage and divorce data to other data sources by county, state, and year.
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Funding View help for Funding
Subject Terms View help for Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage
Smallest Geographic Unit View help for Smallest Geographic Unit
County
Distributor(s) View help for Distributor(s)
Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)
Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection
Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes
- The variable GISJOIN may be used to merge the two data files to each other.
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Only 17 states contain data in the "Same-Sex Couples Data File" (DS2). These include: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.
The District of Columbia and all 50 states, with the exception of Rhode Island, appear in the "All Couples Data File" (DS1).
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Users are encouraged to utilize the Excel "Data Sources" document provided by the Principal Investigator. This file provides a breakdown by state and year links to online reports where information was pulled from. In some instances data was not available and/or came through personal communication between the P.I. and the state. These instances are marked as such.
Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose
To provide an accurate count of all and same-sex marriages and divorces by county by year.
Time Method View help for Time Method
Universe View help for Universe
Marriage and divorce records from the United States for the years 2011 to 2019.
Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation
Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)
Mode of Data Collection View help for Mode of Data Collection
Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables
Both data files start off with a unique case identification value, and then two variables each to differently identify the state and county.
The "All Couples Data File" (DS1) contains 3,176 cases and 23 variables. The primary variables give the marriage and divorce counts for the years 2011 to 2019 by county.
The "Same-Sex Couples Data File" (DS2) contains 997 cases and 59 variables. Variables include marriage and divorce counts for the same range of years, but for all same-sex couples. It also contains additional variables that breaks those counts down by gender for males and females.
HideOriginal Release Date View help for Original Release Date
2025-10-29
Version History View help for Version History
2025-10-29 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
- Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Notes
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.