Coale-McNeil Marriage Model
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.
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Sources
- 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. DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1972.10481287 ↗
- Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Coale-McNeil Model of First Marriage (Nuptiality Schedule). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/demography/coale-mcneil-marriage-model
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