The
divorce rate in America is rising. Do you think that statement is true?
If you do, you’re not alone. As Claire Cain Miller recently pointed out
in an article for The New York Times, we
hear about the rising divorce rate in the news all of the time. This is
curious, because as it happens, the divorce rate isn’t rising.
By most measures, the divorce rate in America has been declining since around 1980.
You’d think that something as simple as counting the number of American
marriages that end in divorce would not require the qualifier “by most
measures,” but it turns out that there is no universally accepted method
for doing the counting. For instance, the widely quoted 50% divorce
rate in the US probably came from a best-guess prediction that has yet
to come true, or from a shortcut method of comparing the number of
divorces and marriages in the same year. This is not considered to be an
accurate method for assessing the divorce rate because it does not
compare equivalent groups. In 1980, for example, older couples may have
been divorcing at a high rate because of the introduction of no-fault
divorce laws, while younger couples might have been putting off marriage
because more women were pursuing careers. Even if the number of
marriages that year were twice the number of divorces, that is not the
same thing as saying that half of all marriages end in divorce. As for
the prediction model, Dr. Rose M. Kreider, a demographer in the
Fertility and Family Statistics Branch of the Census Bureau, told the New York Times in 2005, “At this point, unless there’s some kind of turnaround, I wouldn’t expect any cohort to reach fifty percent, since none already has.”
Even
if everyone could agree on the best way to calculate the divorce rate,
complete demographic data about marriage and divorce are unfortunately
no longer available for analysis. In 1996, the National Center for
Health Statistics (NCHS) stopped collecting yearly statistics on
marriage and divorce due to budgetary considerations, and some states, such as California, do not report divorce rates. The
Census Bureau can provide estimates based on questionnaire data, but
this relies on self-report, and people are reluctant to provide information about marital status. The quality of data available for analysis is therefore weaker now than it has been in past years.
Despite
the paucity of good data and arguments over statistical calculations,
most social scientists and demographers would agree that divorce rates
are declining or stable, that a 50% divorce rate has not yet come to
pass, and that young couples today are so far on a course to have fewer
divorces than their parents’ generation. Why, then, do we keep hearing
about rising divorce rates in America?
One
of the reasons is that a rising divorce rate fits the world view and
agenda of some segments of our society, whereas a falling divorce rate
doesn’t fit as neatly into anyone’s agenda. If you self-identify as
conservative, you may have had a negative reaction to this article so
far, because it seems to be saying, “High divorce rates are no big deal,
and reports of the marriage crisis in America are overblown.” On the
other hand, if you consider yourself to be liberal, you may be thinking,
“Some couples need to get divorced. Should that be half the number of
couples who are divorcing now or twice that number? I don’t know.” In
other words, people who see divorce as a social scourge want to
emphasize how dire the situation has become in America, and people who
see divorce as a necessary evil don’t worry too much about the divorce
rate.
1
This dynamic plays out in the popular press, where much of the news about marriage and divorce is derived from the National Marriage Project,
founded at Rutgers University in 1997 and now based at the University
of Virginia. A core mission of this organization is to “identify
strategies to increase marital quality and stability.” In support of its
mission, the National Marriage Project creates a sense of crisis around
marriage and divorce rates and promotes marriage as a solution to a range of social problems (pdf).
According
to Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of
Maryland, the media have become hooked on publications from the National
Marriage Project as a quick and cheap sources of easily digested print.
This would not be a problem if media outlets disclosed the biases of
their source, but as noted in our book Sacred Cows,
that doesn’t usually happen. For instance, between 2009 and 2012, the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, USA Today and the New York
Times all published articles originating from a report by the National
Marriage Project claiming that the economic recession was saving
marriages.
The
evidence provided was that divorce rates fell between 2007 and 2008
after rising from 2005 levels. We have graphed the crude national
divorce rate, or the number of divorces per 1000 members of the US
population, for those years. Note that this measure of the divorce rate,
like all measures, is flawed. Because it uses the total population as
the base, it includes children and unmarried adults, which confuses
interpretation; a lower divorce rate could result from a baby boom, or
more pertinent to the current situation in the US, a lower marriage
rate. The other problem is that several states have discontinued
reporting divorces, and missing state numbers could distort the overall
national profile.
Bearing
in mind these limitations, our chart does indeed demonstrate that the
divorce rate declined after the great recession began in 2007. However,
when taken in context of overall trends and year-to-year variability,
this change in divorce rate does not seem significant enough to warrant
multiple stories in major national newspapers
(California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota and Oregon have data missing from some of the years in the chart.)
Based
upon rather odd logic, the director of the National Marriage Project,
W. Bradford Wilcox, stated that thrift and meals at home were the cause
of recession-strengthened marriages. It may well be that fewer people divorce during economic recessions; the data on that subject are murky and conflicting.
However, a one-year blip in the divorce rate should not be used as
evidence that the divorce rate is rising any more than a subsequent blip
should be used as evidence that economic hardship makes marriages
stronger.
Promoting
marriage is not a bad goal. Most people would like to be happily
married. It is also completely reasonable to worry about so many
American marriages ending in divorce. No matter what the circumstances,
divorce is painful for families and communities. The problem is that
social and political agendas have muddied the water so much that we
can’t have reasonable discussions based on rational facts. We are all
being misled, not just about the trajectory of divorce rates in America,
but about every aspect of our lives that powerful special interest
groups care to manipulate. In the words of sportscaster Vin Scully,
statistics get used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not
illumination.
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