Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

1-pager of Pew marriage study graphics: neat but undercounts divorce, stepfamilies.

A great graphical summary of the recent Pew Foundation study showing increases in all forms of untraditional families, with nearly everyone aspiring to marriage but only college-educated people typically getting married. But there's one factor distorting this data that also affects most other such studies: it has no way of telling how many currently married people have been divorced in the past -- it just reports them as married. So it understates divorce, but I can't tell how much. Likewise, it reports on children living with married couples but doesn't say how many are children of divorce with stepparents. 

Suicidal Ideation Much Higher for Children of Divorce

 Parental divorce linked to suicidal thoughts -- By Joyann Callender -- January 19, 2011

Adult children of divorce are more likely to have seriously considered suicide than their peers from intact families, suggests new research from the University of Toronto. In a paper published online this week in the journal Psychiatry Research, investigators examined gender specific differences among a sample of 6,647 adults, of whom 695 had experienced parental divorce before the age of 18. The study found that men from divorced families had more than three times the odds of suicidal ideation in comparison with men whose parents had not divorced. Adult daughters of divorce had 83 per cent higher odds of suicidal ideation than their female peers who had not experienced parental divorce.

Full article here  -- by way of Smart Marriages

 

Police Officers' Higher Divorce Rates: Myth

The Huffington Post's "Divorce Myths Debunked" says that this is one of them, and links to a recent study in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology saying 14.5 percent of law enforcement officers are divorced. We've had many requests for stats on this over the years.

Sustainable marriages expand, diversify, improve each individual

The Family Law News Blog: Sustainable marriages expand, diversify, improve each self.