Seth Driggs (sethdriggs1@gmail.com); (Kimalie Nye (kimalie.nye@gmail.com); Kathryn Grendell (kjbraham@byu.edu); Samantha Bailey (snbailey135@gmail.com)

The push for cleaner and smaller energy consumption grows ever stronger. While ideologies on which types of energy are best suited for preserving our planet while still sustaining a high standard of living is a lively debate, it might also be worthwhile to examine the impact that current social trends, specifically marriage, have on energy consumption. Using data collected from databases such as the United Nations, IEA, and individual national departments of statistics by the Global Family Research Initiative at Brigham Young University, we will examine global energy consumption and marriage rates to determine if marriage patterns coincide with energy consumption patterns. The publicly available data from Western countries has led us to hypothesize that as marriage rates have declined in the past few years, energy consumption has increased. We plan on testing this hypothesis through regression analysis between marriage rates and energy consumption. Our results will be limited by the lack of data concerning cohabitation, roommates, or other forms of group living. Future studies could include more types of living arrangements and could split the study into regions to compare trends intra-regionally.