There’s so much data available these days, but there’s lots more I wish I had, listed here.
Surveys
Dating
- What proportion of people meet their life partner at university?
- How does that vary between Oxbridge, London unis, rest of Russell Group, others?
- Are they any more or less likely to divorce / be happy?
- Some stats here which are slightly ambiguous in presentation but I think are saying that if you’re at Oxbridge there’s about a 10% chance of you marrying someone you meet there (and 15-20% chance that you get married conditional on having met someone). They say that 12% of all students married to a partner they met at university but I bet they’ve calculated it wrong (e.g. I doubt they weighted uni-level proportions by their relative sizes, plus it looks like they just took an average over the conditional probability rather than the unconditional one because there are at least three institutions [out of 30] with around 1% unconditional probability and no institution with 13% or higher…)
- What proportion of 18-25 year-olds are single, of those how many want to be in a relationship and of what sort
(casual, long-term, etc)?
- How many are actively looking? How / with what means? For how long?
- What are people’s estimates of the above population proportions / values?
- It’ll probably show up a typical mind fallacy but would be interesting to see what kind of bias in the results exists.
- There are answers to some of these already but with a small (and all-American) sample
- About 55% of men and 45% of women aged 15-29 are single
- Of those, only 10% of men and 15% of women are currently dating someone
- A further 55% of men and 40% of women are open to dating
Wellbeing
- Life satisfaction and expectancy by job occupation (but in particular for « elite » jobs)
- Ideally controlling for other factors like income/wealth, level of education
- There’s a very informal survey of surveys in this Guardian article
- Some research into “full returns” from work
- But many of the occupations aren’t very clear (e.g. what is a “transport associate professional”)
- And there are some oddities (“construction and building trades supervisors” have the highest full returns of everyone except “chief executives and senior professionals”)
- Plus, many of the corporate jobs I would consider doing are all lumped together in the “chief executives and senior professionals” category – it’s not much help with someone choosing whether to aim be a McKinsey consultant or a JP Morgan banker, or even a civil servant. Similarly, within “health professional”, you can’t distinguish between different specialisms (dentist vs consultant vs GP stands out as a basic one), or levels of seniority.