Statistical data

One of the nice perquisites of being in this business is that you get all sorts of interesting things in the mail. Not just e-mail, either although that is where some of the stranger stuff comes from.
Last week, I received a copy of a very interesting volume from the Arkansas Department of Health. It has the compelling title of “Vital Statistics” and includes a variety of fascinating data for the year 1999, the most recent year for which complete figures are available.
Even a cursory scan of this admittedly numerically centered tome revealed the fact that there were 97 marriages in Prairie County in 1999.This represented a considerable statistical decrease from the previous year when Prairie Countians established a 10 year high of 123 marriages. There were a total of 65 divorces or annulments of marriages in Prairie County in 1999. In other words, a full 50 percent more marriages began than ended. Not bad considering the depressing national statistics on this type of societal behavior.
I also learned that among those 97 marriages the median age of the groom was 31 and the median age of the bride was 28. This is significant only to the point that folks in Prairie County continue to show the traditional preference for the groom to be older than the bride.
It was interesting to note that statewide from 1995 through 1999 there were a total of 28,050 marriages among Arkansas residents of which 20.5 percent occurred in either May or June and 65.9 percent of the ceremonies took place either on a Friday or a Saturday. I mean, are Arkansans traditional or what?
Another fascinating fact is that of the 28,050 brides only 1,759 of them were between the ages of 15 years and 19 years. The most popular age group for brides during that period was 20 to 24 years with 6,985. There were even 260 brides over the age of 75.
there were two marriages last year that I found very interesting ,although no names or counties were given. In one case a groom between the ages of 60 and 64 married a bride between the ages of 20 and 24. In another case a groom between the ages of 20 and 24 married a bride between the ages of 65 and 69. I’m not sure what to make of these incidents, except that in the first case, I greatly admire the optimism and personal courage of the groom. In the second case, we may have something for the ladies to hold over their less than energetic spouses. “See there, you old goat, either get with the program or I’m gonna trade you in on a newer model.”
By far, the largest statistical group is marriages in which both the bride and groom are between the ages of 20 and 24. If you think about it, this matches the abilities of brides and grooms to grasp reality. The groom still thinks he’s 10 feet tall and bullet-proof, while the bride has finally achieved a sense of what she wants out of life.
Curiously there doesn’t seem to be any statistical correlation between the ages of the bride and groom when they marry and the likelihood that the marriage will end in divorce. Those numbers seem pretty consistent right down the line across all age groups. So do the figures on the number of years a couple is married when they divorce with one exception, Last year there were 16,557 divorces or annulments statewide. Of those, 1,259 involved couples that had been married for less than a year and 1,387 involved couples that had been married 21 years or more. Most of the totals of divorces were around those numbers in terms of length of marriage except for couples married between 6 and 10 years. That seems to be a particularly dangerous time for marriages. There were 3,582 divorces in that group last year.
This book includes a lot of other numbers on births, deaths, causes of death and assorted other decidedly unamusing topics. The thing to remember when dealing with data of this sort is a phrase that a college professor of mine used 30 years ago to make a lasting impression on me: Statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do.