Love in lockdown · ↗ pudding.cool

Alvin Chang has a lovely new piece in The Pudding about what the pandemic did to American relationships. It is based on “How Couples Meet and Stay Together”, the Stanford survey by Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, which followed couples in 2017, 2020, and 2022.

One of the piece’s main conclusions is that the pandemic widened existing gaps: strong relationships often got stronger, while weaker ones were more likely to deteriorate. I suppose this pattern repeated itself across other domains, such as the huge wealth gains that flowed to the already wealthy during the same period.

It is a remarkably engaging piece of data journalism, with little claymation figurines scrambling to rearrange themselves with every story beat.

There are some caveats. The stylish data presentation uses absolute numbers rather than relative proportions, which can occasionally make it hard to see some of the relationships being described. It also obscures some of the more sophisticated analysis behind the piece, which uses survey weights rather than raw counts. The main visualization only includes participants who were reached at all three time points, which was about half of the original sample. The original manuscript this paper is based on accounts for attrition using survey weights, and argues that attrition is not an important source of bias in any case.

The underlying dataset is open, too!

^{Hat tip to Wealthsimple’s TLDR newsletter.}