The Rise of Cohabitation in the United States: New Historical Estimates

Abstract

This paper improves on previous attempts to infer cohabitation from the decennial census. The 1990 and 2000 censuses included specific responses for “unmarried partner” in the relationship question; previous censuses classified these individuals in broader “partner/roommate” or “partner/friend” categories. Our goal is to infer as best we can which individuals in the censuses of 1960 though 1980 would have described themselves as opposite sex unmarried partners if that option had been available on the census. We do this by first developing rules to identify households that are likely contain an unmarried partner, and then by applying a regression model to refine these measures.