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	Coale-McNeil Marriage Model	Singulate Mean Age at Marriage
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1972	1953
Originator	Ansley J. Coale & Donald R. McNeil	John Hajnal
Type	Parametric model of the age schedule of first marriage	Indirect estimate of mean age at first marriage from census proportions
Seminal source	Coale, A. J., & McNeil, D. R. (1972). The distribution by age of the frequency of first marriage in a female cohort. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 67(340), 743–749.	Hajnal, J. (1953). Age at marriage and proportions marrying. Population Studies, 7(2), 111–136.
Aliases	Coale-McNeil Nuptiality Model, Coale-McNeil Model Schedule of First Marriage, Standard Nuptiality Schedule	SMAM, Hajnal's Mean Age at Marriage, Singulate Mean Age at First Marriage
Related	4	4
Summary	The Coale-McNeil model is a parametric description of how first marriages are distributed by age. Ansley Coale and Donald McNeil showed in 1972 that the age pattern of first marriage in widely different populations has a common shape, captured by a single standard curve that can be shifted and stretched. Three parameters — an origin age at which marriage starts, a scale that controls how spread out the process is, and the ultimate proportion who ever marry — reproduce almost any observed first-marriage schedule, giving demographers a compact and comparable summary of nuptiality.	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.