Somehow I stumbled on the World Values Survey, a cross-national survey that asks among other things “Is marriage an outdated institution?”. I don’t have time to dig into the data a whole lot but I thought I’d share some interesting things (the data is available online!):

• Overall, 83% of respondents think that marriage is not outdated.
• Indonesia is the most traditional country with 96% of the respondents disagreeing that marriage is outdated.
• Andorra is the most progressive country. Almost 40% think that marriage is outdated.
• In the US, barely 13% think that marriage is outdated.
• Across all countries, slightly more than 15% of women and almost 20% of men think marriage is outdated.
• Not surprisingly, if you are married or widowed, you are pretty likely to think marriage is modern (87% and 85% respectively)
• People who are separated had it with marriage: Close to 32% – the highest across marital status – think marriage is outdated.
• The less involved in a religion a person is, the more likely they are to think that marriage is outdated: Only 12% of those who attend a religious service more than once a week vs. 26% who practically never attend a service.

If you want to play around with the data yourself, choose Online Data Analysis from the shortcut menu. This will give you access to an online tool for quickly doing some cross tabs. It looks like there are other interesting variables that the survey captures.
Disclaimer: I haven’t looked at the survey methodology, thus I don’t know how representative the survey results are. So, when you read the nuggets I found above, please read the percentages as “percent of survey participants.”

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