Do half of all marriages really end in divorce? It’s probably the most often quoted statistic about modern love, and it’s a total buzz kill, in line with saying that half of all new shoes will give you hammertoes or that 50% of babies will grow up to be ugly. Now the divorce stat is coming under scrutiny ”” and not just because of its unromanticity.
“It’s a very murky statistic,” says Jennifer Baker, director of the marriage- and family-therapy programs at Forest Institute, a postgraduate psychology school in Springfield, Mo. She’s often erroneously credited with arriving at the 50% figure; it was around long before she used it. Figuring out divorce rates is tricky. Not all states collect marital data, and the numbers change dramatically depending on the methods and sources that are used. In the end, the best that researchers can do is look for trends within a specific group or cohort (say, all people who married in the 1980s) and project what will happen. As Baker says, “It’s very difficult to know, if a couple gets married today, whether they’ll still be married in 40 years.”
But in an upbeat new guide to marriage, For Better, Tara Parker-Pope, a New York Times reporter (and divorcée), devotes a chapter to debunking the 50% stat, at least among the subset of the population that reads books like hers. Since the 1970s, when more women started going to college and delaying marriage, “marital stability appears to be improving each decade,” she writes. For example, about 23% of college graduates who married in the ’70s split within 10 years. For those who wed in the ’90s, the rate dropped to 16%.
This “stat” has been around a LOOOOONG time. It was the “stat” used in both of my graduate courses on stats as an example of awful statistics.
I believe it was explained this way. Take the # of marriages in any location and divide by the number of the divorces filed in the same location and in the same time frame and voila- 50% of marriages end in divorce. TOTALLY ignoring the marriages that did NOT end in divorce from that time frame or before.
[i]devotes a chapter to debunking the 50% stat [b]at least among the subset of the population that reads books like hers[/b][/i]
Well it’s not exactly news that there are different rates of marital stability among different subgroups of the population. This is kind of like saying that “hurricanes are not really a problem, at least not among any of my friends in Nebraska.” Folks in Florida and the Gulf Coast might have a different experience.
But that caveat aside, I’m all for clarity of definition and precision in statistics. There are far too many false / vague stats that get accepted as “gospel truth” without any examination. So, by all means, yes, let’s look for hard data!
38% of statistics are made up……. ; )
Rugby–I think 52.76% of statistics are made up. So if we take your truth and add it to my truth, in a sort of Griswoldian manner, the average for truth is 45.38%, which is pretty darn close to the divorce rate statistics we all know and love. See. Now doesn’t that make you fell better?
RPP (#3) and DK (#4),
LOL. Delightful humor.
But alas, divorce stats are no laughing matter. No matter how you calculate the divorce rate, it’s appallingly high. And unfortunately, studies show that the children of divorced parents are more likely to suffer a divorce themselves than those raised in an intact family, so the problem tends to snowball over generations.
The somewhat distorted 50% figure conceals such complicating factors as the fact that the divorce rate for those on their first marriage is well below that for persons on their second or third marriage. And financial stress also raises the danger of divorce significantly, which is one key reason why those couples at the bottom of the economic ladder are particularly at risk. IOW, the risk of divorce varies a lot according to numerous factors. For example, sadly, the risk of divorce when two families are blended (remarriage when both partners come into it with kids from a former marriage) is significantly worse than 50%.
Yet, happily, the marvelous ministry known as [b]Marriage Savers,[/b] founded and led by evangelical Christians Mike and Harriet McManus (former Episcopalians), has helped many churches to drastically reduce the number of divorces in their congregation. For example, the simple idea Marriage Savers promotes of encouraging churches to assign an experienced “mentor couple” to newlyweds (in the first two years of marriage) has proven highly effective in helping build stronger, lasting marriages. It really works.
OK, let the joking resume.
David Handy+
In my own sociology classes I heard it the way Blu Cat lady did. Terrible statistic that negates the amount of marriages that last and have lasted, and does not take into consideration the amount of time people are married before they get divorced.
As any good researcher/statistician would say, “We need more data and more studies”…
I think that this famous statistic gets severely skewed by ignoring the effect folks like my husband’s first wife. Between my Dear Hubby of 21 years, myself, and his ex, there have been a total of 5 marriages and 4 divorces. The common element in this appalling statistic (80% divorce rate)? Her.
#6, Yep. Bottom Feeder, I am not too surprised at the similarity as one was a graduate Stats class in the Psychology Dept. and the other was in Biology (my major) Dept. The prof for the Biology Dept. class in Biostatistics was a Psychologist turned Neuroendocrinologist. She understood stats very, very well. From that class, I have the utmost respect for those who use stats wisely. Don’t even get me started on “stats” in Medical Journals- sigh…..
I saw and listened to the presentation about Marriage Savers that the McManus’s gave at Mere Anglicanism back in January. Their work is quite impressive. I would love to see more communities adopt their principles. When Kansas City did so, their divorce rate went down.