Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Interesting things happen when little boys grow up with sisters: They are less likely to help mom with housekeeping chores—and they’re more likely to grow up to be Republicans, according to a new paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Politics (doc). Young men who were raised with sisters also are more likely […]
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 […]
Today, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act’s key section, which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages and denied same-sex couples who were married under state law a panoply of federal benefits — from favorable tax treatment to the ability to be buried together in veterans’ cemeteries — that are available to […]
As the Supreme Court issued a key legal victory to same-sex marriage supporters today with its ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act, it’s worth looking back to an event that sparked a new discussion of homosexual issues – the Stonewall riots that occurred in New York City this week in 1969.
For nearly three decades researchers have known that better-educated adults are living increasingly longer than those with less education. (Kids: One more reason to stay in school.) Then in the mid-1980s a new trend emerged: The education-mortality gap began growing much faster among women than among men. By 2006, white women without a high school […]
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 […]
Americans often say they want their representatives in Congress to put the country’s needs over local concerns. But four novel experiments suggest that the public does just the opposite. In a new study, respondents rated a member of Congress far more favorably if the lawmaker put the interests of his or her district or state […]
Before we launched our first major effort to capture the views and opinions of LGBT adults for our series ‘LGBT in Changing Times,’ we convened a focus group to help inform our approach. In March 2013, we assembled 12 LGBT adults from the Washington, D.C. area: five gay men, three transgender adults, two bisexual men […]
Do one’s political leanings blind people to the facts? Judging from decades of polling, the answer is sometimes yes—partisanship appears to lead some people to claim as facts things that aren’t particularly factual.
Notifications