Psychophysical scales of age based on marriage frequencies

The frequency of marriage between women of one age and men of another was assumed to depend upon the overall tendencies of women and men of the corresponding psychological ages to marry, multiplied by a nonincreasing function of the absolute difference between the psychological ages. Using this model and standard nonmetric scaling techniques, scales of psychological age as a function of physical age were inferred from published marriage frequencies for 1951 and 1959. Psychological age was well approximated by the cube root of the difference between physical age and a threshold age of about 12 years for women and 14 years for men.