Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Welcome to the Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

This site continues, but does not duplicate, the work of the Divorce Statistics Collection, gathering divorce statistics, and citations and abstracts of studies on the incidence, causes and effects of divorce. If you have information that is not here nor on the Divorce Statistics Collection, please send it in, using the comments section.
To get complete information and citations, you should also review the research pages at the Howard Center, Smart Marriages, the Bristol Community Family Trust, the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center, RAND, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Divorce Statistics Collection’s page on your topic. The main pages or sub-sites within the Divorce Statistics Collection are:

Study of Lincoln's 131 Illinois divorce cases

A summary of the records of Lincoln's law firm's divorce cases, by Stacy Pratt McDermott, was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal blog post. Statistics include which sex filed how often; what percentage of plaintiffs of each sex were granted the divorces they sought; what grounds were claimed and how each kind of case was treated; and child custody and support outcomes.

The full study is "Lincoln Legal Briefs #45" but you have to scroll down a couple screens to get to it. It also includes descriptions of several individual cases.

30% of Divorced Women Knew He Was Mr. Wrong All Along!

"The Shocking Truth for Thirty Percent of Divorced Women" by Jennifer Gauvain on Huffington Post

More discussion of the study, by the same author: "Why So Many Of Us Marry The Wrong Person"

 

 

Pre-engagement cohabitation correlates w/divorce, "trial cohabitation" correlates w/troubled relationships - study

Couples who shack up before tying the knot are more likely to get divorced than their counterparts who don't move in together until marriage, a new study suggests. Upwards of 70 percent of U.S. couples are cohabiting these days before marrying, the researchers estimate. ... the shared abode could lead to marriage  for all the wrong reasons. "We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabiting," said lead researcher Galena Rhoades of the University of Denver.

...  about 40 percent of participants reported they didn't live together before marriage, 43 percent did so before engagement, and about 16 percent cohabited only after getting engaged.

Those who listed "testing" as the primary move-in reason were more likely than others to score high on measures of negative communication, such as, "My partner criticizes or belittles my opinions, feelings, or desires." Such testers also had lower confidence in the quality and stability of their relationships. "Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships," Rhoades said. 

"Pre-marriage shacking up often ends in divorce: Cohabitating couples often marry for wrong reasons, researchers find"

- By Jeanna Bryner on msnbc.com, citing a study in the Journal of Family Psychology, February, 2009.

 

Massachusetts's Most-Divorced Towns, from Census Data

"Massachusetts Most-Divorced Towns" - WCBV-TV Boston

 

Married moms least depressed, single moms most depressed

"Parenthood is Hard, But Married Parents Are the Least Likely to be Depressed" -- Gruntled Center, 12/12/11, citing Marquardt and Wilcox' State of Our Unions 2011.

"Why Marriage Matters: 26 Conclusions from the Social Sciences" -now in 3rd edition, e-book

Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences

By W. Bradford Wilcox. Now Available as an E-Book! 

via Bill Coffin at NARME

 

Generosity with time, small kindnesses correlate strongly with better marriages

The Generous Marriage

 New York Times Magazine 12/11/11

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Marriage at record low, & always has been for last 50 years

Here's a link directly to the Pew study which there have been so many newspaper stories about today. In one sense, it isn't news: marriage is at a record low, but it's been steadily declining for 50 years, mostly from increased age at first marriage, much more than from any abandonment of the idea of marriage. And therefore it has ALWAYS been at a record low, at any given time during its 50-year decline.

The study has many other interesting facts about particular demographic groups, including that the decline is mostly among less-educated people, and is worldwide including less-developed countries.

Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married – A Record Low: 

New Marriages Down 5% from 2009 to 2010

by D’Vera Cohn, Jeffrey Passel and Wendy Wang

Dueling banalities: The 9 Reasons for Divorce vs. The 5 Reasons for Divorce

"5 Common Reasons for Divorce" by Jennifer Chang on simpledivorceadvice.com lists:

• Infidelity
• Growing Apart
• Abuse
• Finances
• Sex

But it recharacterizes them as "really the end process of a marriage in trouble." It says "In the United States Infidelity is the cause for a third of divorces", which works out to be the most common reason for divorce. That is the only item in the article that looks like it is based on any hard evidence. There are many other claims about the real reasons behind the above reasons, but with no citations or descriptions of sources it is impossible to tell whether any of it is based on evidence, or is just conventional wisdom, urban myths, etc.

 

"Understanding the Top Reasons for Divorce", by simpledivorceadvice.com (no byline), is a decently commonsensical breakdown of nine common reasons for divorce, although it does not claim to be based on anything scientific or authoritative. There are many equally accurate ways to describe the causes of many divorces. Unlike in other areas of the law, it can be hard or impossible to look at the chain of causes and effects and identify which is the "proximate cause". There are more immediate, and more fundamental, causes, and ultimately the reasons behind why some choose divorce, and why some behave in ways that provoke divorce, are "because they can." The Nine Reasons are:

• Damaging Communication, 
• Financial Difficulties, 
• Infidelity
• Abuse mental and physical
• Addiction of all kinds
• Unmet Expectations
• Commitment Issues
• Change in Goals 
• Stepfamily Breakdown

Lesbian mothers' breakups and custody arrangements: new long-term study

When lesbian mothers split up -- latest results from the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study

From the summary by Nancy Polikoff: 

The NLLFS has been following 85 children of lesbians born through donor insemination beginnning in the 1980's.  Information about the study and its earlier published research is all located on the NLLFS website.

Of the 73 two-mother families in the study, 40 couples had split up by the time their child was 17 (over 90% of these occurred before the child was 13).  This is a higher rate of separation than the divorce rate for married heterosexuals.  71% of separated couples reported shared custody of the children, a number considerably higher than the rate of shared custody among divorced heterosexuals.  59% of the couples had completed second-parent adoptions, and parents in that group were more likely to share custody.  The children whose mothers had completed second parent adoptions were much more likely to report feeling close to both mothers.  

Neither adoption nor joint custody showed any correlation with psychological health or problem behavior, but that may be related to the small sample size. Marriage was not part of the study because nearly all the separations happened before gay marriage or civil unions, etc. were available.