D’Vera Cohn

This is an excerpt from a FactTank posting about new data from the National Center for Health Statistics about birth rates in 2011. Rates for younger women fell to record lows, but rates continued to rise for women ages 40 and older.

The overall U.S. birth rate declined to an all-time low in 2011. Birth rates reached an all-time low among women in their teens and early 20s, while rising to the highest level in four decades among women in their early 40s.

The AAA’s annual travel forecast projects that 34.4 million Americans will drive more than 50 miles from home during the July 4th holiday, a tiny dip from 34.7 million last year. The chief reason, according to AAA, is that the five-day holiday period is a day shorter than it was in 2012, when July 4 […]

There is an immigration angle to the Supreme Court ruling that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act: Some gay and lesbian Americans will now be able to obtain visas for their foreign-born same-sex spouses. That is because the court’s ruling states that federal law cannot make a distinction between opposite-sex married couples and […]

This is a link to a FactTank posting about how the German census counted 1.5 million fewer people than the government expected, mainly because of poor government record-keeping. This lesson is relevant to plans for the next U.S. Census.

When the results of the 2011 German census were announced recently, they included an embarrassing error – at least in the demographics world. It showed the German population was 1.5 million people short of what the government had expected. The news dealt a blow to Germany’s reputation for efficient record-keeping, and it’s also relevant to […]

This is a brief description of a posting on FactTank about new Census Bureau population estimates that show deaths among non-Hispanic whites exceeded births in 2012.

The finding that made headlines from this week’s Census Bureau release of new national and state population estimates—that there are now more deaths than births among non-Hispanic whites—is a vivid illustration of the rapid long-term growth in the number of older Americans. But first, you might ask, how could there suddenly be more deaths than […]

Overview Mothers with infant children1 in the U.S. today are more educated than they ever have been. In 2011, more than six-in-ten (66%) had at least some college education, while 34% had a high school diploma or less and just 14% lacked a high school diploma, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of […]

National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.