Current status life tables

Data on first marriages and person-years of exposure are not usually collected (one would need an exhaustive vital registration system), but marital status information is included in virtually every census and survey. The proportions single (never married) can be computed for each age, and their graphical representation bears great resemblance to a survival function in an ordinary life table (Figure 1).

However, marriage (unlike death) is not an event that everyone will experience, and the survival function will not necessarily join the x-axis as it does for the survival function of a life table where death is the decrement of interest. ( What fraction of the population never marries in the example below? ). Because first marriages are not common (or allowed) in childhood, the fraction single will only start to decline sometime during the teenage years.

Figure 1: Proportions never married by age (hypothetical data)