Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Surprising new stats on Air Force marriage and divorce

Female airmen, caregivers split up the most  - Air Force Times.

Excerpts: Forget everything you thought you knew about marriage and divorce in the Air Force. Most of it isn't true. Airmen in career fields with the highest deployment tempos don't get divorced more than those who spend most of their time at home station. Fighter jocks, supposed playboys, actually get divorced less than the force as a whole. And those whose job is to care for others -- nurses, social workers, family support center staff and educators -- have the hardest time staying married. As of August, 70.9 percent of officers and 56.3 percent of enlisted were married, and 4.4 percent of active-duty officers and 7.3 percent of enlisted airmen were divorced.

Marriages and Divorces by State, 1990-2006

The 2009 Statistical Abstract: Marriages and Divorces by State, 1990-2006.

Marital Status in the 2009 Statistical Abstract: Marital Status and Living Arrangements

The 2009 Statistical Abstract: Marital Status and Living Arrangements.(It looks like the share of the population listed as divorced is actually the "divorced and not remarried".

Good overview of the recent history of divorce

"The Evolution of Divorce" by Brad Wilcox in National Affairs  is a really good, thoughtful history that brings together some very relevant but rarely-seen statistics, along with analysis of how cultures, attitudes and beliefs have changed over time.

It includes stats based on the numbers of marriages, which are considerably less common and more informative than purely per-capita stats. Some of them are:

From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled — from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s.
...
The divorce rate fell from a historic high of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women in 1980 to 17.5 in 2007. In real terms, this means that slightly more than 40% of contemporary first marriages are likely to end in divorce, down from approximately 50% in 1980. Perhaps even more important, recent declines in divorce suggest that a clear majority of children who are now born to married couples will grow up with their married mothers and fathers.

There is much more -- stats and sophisticated analysis on marriage quality, attitudes, low-conflict vs. high-conflict marriages and divorces, the effects on children, out-of-wedlock birth, cohabitation, social class, and the connections between all these phenomena.