EMBARGOED UNTIL: 12:01 A.M.EDT, JULY 27, 1998 (MONDAY) Public Information Office CB98-126 301-457-3030/301-457-3670 (fax) 301-457-4067 (TDD) e-mail: pio@census.gov Terry Lugaila 301-457-2465 Nearly 70 Percent of Elderly Widows Live Alone, According to U.S. Census Bureau Almost half the women over 65 years of age in the United States in 1997 were widows. About 7 in 10 of these women lived alone, according to a report released today by the Commerce Department's Census Bureau. The embargoed report and tabulations can be accessed at http://census.gov/dcmd/www/embaro/embargo.html. After the release time, the report, Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1997(Update), and tables (PPL-90) can be accessed at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/ms-la.html. The report includes these other highlights: - About 109.2 million adults, more than half the adult population (55.9 percent), were married and living with their spouse in 1997. - Approximately 19.3 million adults, about 10 percent of the adult population, were divorced at the time of the survey. - About 85 percent of children with a single parent lived with their mother. Of these, about 4 in 10 lived with mothers who had never married. Children who lived with a single father were more likely to be living with a divorced father (about 45.1 percent) than a never-married father (31.2 percent). - There were about 4.1 million unmarried-couple households, of which more than 1 in 3 (35.6 percent) had children under 15 years of age present. - Nearly 14 million people (34.5 percent) between 25 and 34 years old had never been married. More than half (54.2 percent) of the African Americans in this age group had never married. Data are from the March 1997 Current Population Survey. As in all surveys, the data are subject to sampling variability and other sources of error. Editor's Note: The Public Information Office now has a media-access server for embargoed news releases and data sets. It is available to accredited media representatives only. To gain access, please contact us for a username and password. The media-access server's Internet address is http://www.census.gov/dcmd/www/embargo/embargo.html. We would appreciate any comments you may have about the site. The Census Bureau pre-eminent collector and provider of timely, relevant and quality data about the people and economy of the United States. In more than 100 surveys annually and 20 censuses a decade, evolving from the first census in 1790, the Census Bureau provides official information about America's people, businesses, industries and institutions.
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