Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Intermarriage—New Facts, New Attitudes

Wendy Wang, Pew Research Center
Jeffrey S. Passel, Pew Hispanic Center

A majority of Americans (63%) are “fine with” their family members marrying someone of any other race or ethnicity. At the same time, a quarter of the public (25%) think that more people of different races marrying each other is a good thing for society and only 14% say that increasing intermarriage is “a bad thing” for society, according to recent Pew Research Center surveys. Using data from the decennial census and American Community survey, we track the incidents of intermarriages in the U.S. since 1980. A record of 14.6% of all new marriages in 2008 were either interracial or interethnic, up from around 7% in 1980. We present the attitudinal data as well as updated results from the 2009 and 2010 ACS by demographic and social characteristics as race, gender, age, and education to shed light on the factors that may account for the trend.