Study: Facebook and marriage

For many married couples, the "something blue," in that popular rhyme is Facebook. The social network released a study Monday showing that 28 percent of married college graduates on Facebook went to the same college. Facebook also found that 15 percent of married couples went to the same high school as their spouse. The company's data science team took a deep dive into these numbers, finding out which schools were the best for matrimony. The data science team put together a graph, showing the connection between spouses on Facebook. The dots show the colleges with the highest concentration of couples who have indicated their status on the social network, ranging from blue (less likely) to red (more likely). Data scientist Sofus Macskassy explained the findings, as well as the large red dot found at Brigham Young University, whose students are predominantly members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: Brigham Young University is the largest religious school and has one of the highest rates of married graduates. Several other religious universities make our top 25 list (see below). To find out the connection between religiousness of the student body and the spouse rate, we took the top 100 religious designations specified by Facebook users in their profiles, and labeled some of them as religious, e.g. (Christian, Baptist, Jewish, Muslim - Sunni, LDS,...),and others as non-religious (Atheist, Agnostic, None), yet others, e.g. Pastafarian, we omitted altogether. We then correlated the spouse-rate with the religiousness average (-1 being 100% non-religious and +1 being 100% religious among those alumni reporting a religion in their profile). We observed a weak-to-moderate correlation (ρ = 0.40) between the ratio of religious to non,and the likelihood that a woman attended the same college as her spouse. Though BYU may be the most notable school with a high list of married couples on Facebook, it ranks fifth in terms of the proportion of women on Facebook sharing the same college as their spouse: Readers: Did you go to college with your spouse? Top image courtesy of Shutterstock. Others courtesy of Facebook.

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Study: Facebook and marriage

Justin Lafferty

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Justin Lafferty