Marriage and Divorce Statistics
About
These published reports provide information on marriages and divorces recorded in Tennessee by the county clerks' offices and courts, respectively, across the state and registered with the Tennessee Office of Vital Records. They present the number and crude event rates per 1,000 Tennessee residents. For marriages, additional information on the ages of the parties to the union is reported.
Terminology
Crude event rate: The number of events - marriages or divorces - that occurred during the year for a given number (usually 1,000) of residents in the indicated geographic area, regardless of the distribution of ages or marital status of the population. Also simply referred to as a "rate", crude event rate allows a data user to compare information over time. This is the statistic presented in Tennessee reports of marriages and divorces.
Age/Sex adjusted event rate: The number of events that occurred during the year with respect to a specific segment of the population, which adjusts the ratio to compare the number of events with a relevant group. In marriage and divorce events, this may be the population that is of a typical age for marriage. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey calculates an age- and sex-adjusted rate for marriage and divorce as the number of events for every 1,000 women aged 15 and older.
Partner 1/Partner 2: In 2015, the Tennessee Department of Health modified the Certificate of Marriage, which allowed parties to appear in any order on the marriage license and to accommodate designators other than "Groom" and "Bride." "Partner 1" and "Partner 2" are used for the purposes of statistical presentation to represent the order in which the parties are listed on the marriage certificate.