Half of All Marriages End in Divorce. True or False?
The 50 percent statistic is very misleading, if not completely wrong. "The demographics of divorce are routinely reported wrong, calculated wrong or misinterpreted," says Robert Hughes, a former professor in the Department of Human & Family Services, College of Human Environmental Science, University of Missouri-Columbia. Hughes says that for every two marriages that occurred in the 1990s there was one divorce. "This does not mean the divorce rate is 50 percent [because] the people getting married in a single year are not the same ones getting divorced," he says.
No one is really certain about how the 50 percent number imbedded itself so deeply in popular imagination. "The assumption has been (by those who have not studied it carefully) is that the 50 percent number came from someone noticing that, in the U.S., we have about 2.4 million marriages a year and 1.2 million divorces a year. Hence, 50 percent of married couples divorce," says Scott M. Stanley of the University of Denver.
"No serious demographer ever looked at the approximately 2.4 million marriages a year and the 1.2 million divorces a year to arrive at the 50 percent number. That is a misunderstanding that began early in the debate about what the divorce rate reality - a misunderstanding that is, unfortunately, widely perpetuated," Stanley says.
Part of the difficulty with divorce statistics is that the rates measure divorces in different ways.
Divorce rates become clearer when the calculation and compilation of the statistics is understood. Federal funding for the collection and publication of detailed marriage and divorce statistics was suspended in 1996, and as a result an annual count of divorces in the United States is not complete. Not all states report divorces, but despite this limitation the U.S Census Bureau calculates what is known as a crude divorce rate - the number of divorces per 1,000 people in the population. This calculation leaves much to be desired because it includes children and single adults who are not at risk of divorce. "[C]hanges in the proportion of children in the population will affect the divorce rate, even if the underlying divorce trend is stable," according to Paul R. Amato, who wrote "Interpreting Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates and Data on the Percentage of Children with Single Parents," a publication of the National Health Marriage Resource Center. With these limitations in mind, the crude rate rose from 2.2 in 1960 to 5.3 in 1981 - a 141 percent increase, and then dropped gradually to 3.6 in 2007 - a 32 percent decline.
The refined divorce rate - the number of divorces per 1,000 married woman - includes only those people at risk of divorce, so social scientists and demographers see it as preferable to the crude rate. Using this routine, the divorce rate ranged from a low of 14.3 in North Dakota to a high of 34.5 in Washington, D.C., for a national average of 19.4, according to National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Using this regime, in 2008, divorce fell from a rate of 17 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2007 to 16.9 per 1,000 married women.
Another number that sometimes comes into social commentaries is what is termed the cohort approach, which is the divorce rate among "people who married in a given year or set of adjacent years. People who married in 1990, for example, may have a different lifetime probability of divorce than people who married in 2000.
Thus, the divorce rate is misleading for a number of reasons. Not all states report divorce statistics. The divorce count is based on the total population, not the total married population. Using per capita at today's population distorts the comparison of current marriages because divorces that happen today arose from a smaller population yesterday.
http://www.divorcesource.com/ds/main/u-s-divorce-rates-and-statistics-1037.shtml
The 50 percent statistic is very misleading, if not completely wrong. "The demographics of divorce are routinely reported wrong, calculated wrong or misinterpreted," says Robert Hughes, a former professor in the Department of Human & Family Services, College of Human Environmental Science, University of Missouri-Columbia. Hughes says that for every two marriages that occurred in the 1990s there was one divorce. "This does not mean the divorce rate is 50 percent [because] the people getting married in a single year are not the same ones getting divorced," he says.
No one is really certain about how the 50 percent number imbedded itself so deeply in popular imagination. "The assumption has been (by those who have not studied it carefully) is that the 50 percent number came from someone noticing that, in the U.S., we have about 2.4 million marriages a year and 1.2 million divorces a year. Hence, 50 percent of married couples divorce," says Scott M. Stanley of the University of Denver.
"No serious demographer ever looked at the approximately 2.4 million marriages a year and the 1.2 million divorces a year to arrive at the 50 percent number. That is a misunderstanding that began early in the debate about what the divorce rate reality - a misunderstanding that is, unfortunately, widely perpetuated," Stanley says.
Part of the difficulty with divorce statistics is that the rates measure divorces in different ways.
Divorce rates become clearer when the calculation and compilation of the statistics is understood. Federal funding for the collection and publication of detailed marriage and divorce statistics was suspended in 1996, and as a result an annual count of divorces in the United States is not complete. Not all states report divorces, but despite this limitation the U.S Census Bureau calculates what is known as a crude divorce rate - the number of divorces per 1,000 people in the population. This calculation leaves much to be desired because it includes children and single adults who are not at risk of divorce. "[C]hanges in the proportion of children in the population will affect the divorce rate, even if the underlying divorce trend is stable," according to Paul R. Amato, who wrote "Interpreting Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates and Data on the Percentage of Children with Single Parents," a publication of the National Health Marriage Resource Center. With these limitations in mind, the crude rate rose from 2.2 in 1960 to 5.3 in 1981 - a 141 percent increase, and then dropped gradually to 3.6 in 2007 - a 32 percent decline.
The refined divorce rate - the number of divorces per 1,000 married woman - includes only those people at risk of divorce, so social scientists and demographers see it as preferable to the crude rate. Using this routine, the divorce rate ranged from a low of 14.3 in North Dakota to a high of 34.5 in Washington, D.C., for a national average of 19.4, according to National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Using this regime, in 2008, divorce fell from a rate of 17 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2007 to 16.9 per 1,000 married women.
Another number that sometimes comes into social commentaries is what is termed the cohort approach, which is the divorce rate among "people who married in a given year or set of adjacent years. People who married in 1990, for example, may have a different lifetime probability of divorce than people who married in 2000.
Thus, the divorce rate is misleading for a number of reasons. Not all states report divorce statistics. The divorce count is based on the total population, not the total married population. Using per capita at today's population distorts the comparison of current marriages because divorces that happen today arose from a smaller population yesterday.
http://www.divorcesource.com/ds/main/u-s-divorce-rates-and-statistics-1037.shtml
