Where can I find historical data about the proportion of marriages that have occurred between people who worked together - ideally dating back to the 70s and yearly? If there is a breakdown by job type, then so much the better!
I have a theory, but before telling anyone about it I need to see if this data correlates with some other data that I have.
Bumping
I don’t think you’ll find anything other than anecdotal data, It’s hard enough to find general demographic information about marriage (ie, how many people are married, at what age they get married, how long they stay married, etc.) They stopped asking questions about marriage in the US Census, and other than data on marriage licenses being issued, I don;t think there’s much in the way of hard data available.
Perhaps then there’s a way of finding out the jobs of people who are both married? That would actually be slightly better for my purposes.
Unlikely. There would be no reason for anyone to track that kind of demographic that I can think of.
Can you search on applications for marriage licences based on occupation or something? I can’t think of any other way than if someone applied for a marriage licence and had to state their occupation and/or employer.
I want to see if the rise in autism can be correlated to an increase in engineers/other technical types marrying together, but without any data it’s only a very weak hypothethis. Surprising no one has tracked this before.
Then it sounds like you want data on parents’ occupations based on their children (autistic vs. non). Marrying won’t have much to do with it.
Maybe you should start a thread in GD, I’d love to hear the details behind your theory. Sounds interesting.
It’s already established that parents in technical fields are significantly more likely to have autistic children, especially when both parents are from technical fields. What I want to establish is how many more parents in technical fields there are in the general population.
Were you inspired by the Wired article on Asperger’s Syndrome and autism in techie populations? I wish you luck in your studies, I find the topic fascinating.
No, although that’s interesting and a supportive anecdote - I was inspired by reading a short ditty by Simon Baron Cohen in the (pleasant enough) book “Things we believe but cannot prove”.
To me it seems obvious that this is the sort of data that would either refute or support the theory.
Well, this data you might be able to extract from the US Census data . They do collect information on occupation, although their focus on “households” would exclude divorced parents from your dataset.
Short article about the issue in IEEE Spectrum Online. Also, a follow-up with notes from Simon Baron Cohen (yes, he’s related to Sacha “Ali G” Baron Cohen)
And an anecdotal quote from the article: