Comment Of Coding Marital Status In Latin America

Abstract

Although the value of information on marital status is often questioned seriously, this note assumes that it is valuable and comments on its rather distinctive but confusing nature in Latin American censuses. Latin American censuses often list “consensual union” as a marital status. This is confusing however, because one has to wonder what this means and how one is supposed to use the information in comparative studies. It would seem that “consensual union” is at once too inclusive and too limiting a term. Although one might consider consensual union theoretically to be a type of trial marriage, censuses and surveys also use the tenn for unions that might better be termed customary marriage, common-law marriage or childless cohabitation. Curiously perhaps, the term “consensual union,’ is usually not used to denote stable, child-producing “visiting unions" in which the partners do not share a common residence. Rather, people in visiting unions are usually called "single" although they are clearly in a stable sexual relationship. Should different kinds of unions ideally be allocated separate and more accurate labels?

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