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Coale Fertility Indices×Singulate Mean Age at Marriage×
FieldDemographyDemography
FamilyProcess / pipelineProcess / pipeline
Year of origin19691953
OriginatorAnsley J. Coale (Princeton European Fertility Project)John Hajnal
TypeStandardized indices of fertility relative to a maximum (Hutterite) scheduleIndirect estimate of mean age at first marriage from census proportions
Seminal sourceCoale, A. J., & Watkins, S. C. (Eds.). (1986). The Decline of Fertility in Europe. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691629278Hajnal, J. (1953). Age at marriage and proportions marrying. Population Studies, 7(2), 111–136. DOI ↗
AliasesCoale's Indices, Princeton European Fertility Project Indices, Indices of Overall, Marital and Nuptiality FertilitySMAM, Hajnal's Mean Age at Marriage, Singulate Mean Age at First Marriage
Related44
SummaryCoale's fertility indices are a set of standardized measures — If (overall fertility), Ig (marital fertility), Ih (nonmarital fertility), and Im (proportion married, an index of marriage) — that express a population's childbearing relative to the highest reliably recorded natural-fertility schedule, that of the Hutterites. Devised by Ansley Coale for the Princeton European Fertility Project, they hold the maximum age schedule of fertility fixed so that differences between populations reflect real differences in fertility and marriage rather than age structure, and they tie together into a single identity linking overall fertility to marriage and to fertility within and outside marriage.The singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) is an indirect demographic estimate of the average age at first marriage, computed entirely from the proportions of people who have never married by age, as recorded in a single census or survey. Introduced by John Hajnal in 1953, it sidesteps the need for registered marriage dates: by treating the never-married proportions as a synthetic-cohort survival curve in the single state, it recovers the mean number of years lived single before first marriage among those who eventually marry.
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ScholarGateCompare methods: Coale Fertility Indices · Singulate Mean Age at Marriage. Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/compare