Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Smartmarriages responds on Gottman "divorce predictions"

A couple days ago I posted Slate's excerpt about John Gottman's work from Laurie Abraham's book, "The Husbands and Wives Club" . Diane Sollee of Smart Marriages responded:

>To which we'd say, a big "so what." The point is not to use the research to

predict which couples will divorce.  I don't know of a single marriage

educator, including John Gottman, who even attempts to do this - or who has

a need to do it.  The research does help us in our work with couples

(premarital or long-married) when we can say "these behaviors are correlated

with marital success and these behaviors are highly correlated with couples

that divorce" ­ the exact point Gottman is making.  The research is

invaluable in understanding which behaviors lead to marital success and

which to failure, ­ to help us know what to teach.

Laurie Abraham questions Gottman's divorce-prediction process

Can You Really Predict the Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?

US divorce rate holds at low of 3.4 divorces annually per 1,000 population (0.68%)

National Vital Statistics Report - Volume 58 Number 12.

Table: Provisional number of marriages and divorces: Each state and Puerto Rico, May 2008 and 2009, and cumulative figures, 2007-2009

This latest, provisionally-reported rate is for the 12 months ending in May, 2009. A more familiar way to express it would be 0.34%; or, since there are two people in every divorce, 0.68% of the entire population got divorced during that 12-month period.

The report also includes absolute numbers of divorce for each state for May and year-to-date, with the similar figures from the last two years for comparison.

Divorce figures exclude data for California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, and Minnesota, because those states do not even collect divorce rate information. Population bases for divorce rates also exclude these states. Divorce figures include reported annulments. There is considerable variability among the states in the procedures that are used to submit the counts of marriages and divorces to NCHS and in the extent to which the states update their counts of marriages and divorces as new information is received. Therefore, counts vary in their completeness. Marriage and divorce counts, unlike other provisional data, may be updated after the end of a data year if final counts are provided by the state.