Remaining Single: A Continuing Trend in Thailand

Philip Guest, Population Council
Lindy Williams, Cornell University
Anchalee Varangrat, Mahidol University

This paper documents and analyzes the increasing proportions of Thai women and men who remain unmarried into their forties. The analysis uses data from microdata samples of the 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 Thai censuses, and is supplemented by focus group data. We explore differences among socioeconomic groups using census data and supplement those findings with data from focus groups of married and unmarried males and females. The census data indicate that the move away from marriage, either through a delay in age at marriage, or through not marrying at all, continued through the 1990s for both sexes, but is now more pronounced for men. These changes could be a result of a number of processes, some involving choice and some involving marriage market constraints. Changing preferences regarding marriage are examined using focus group data, and less directly, by examining trends in the proportions never-married across socio-economic categories.