Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Female GIs struggle with higher divorce rate - AP

Female GIs struggle with higher rate of divorce 

By  Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press –  March 8, 2011

"Their marriages are more than twice as likely to end in divorce as those of their male comrades - and up to three times as likely for enlisted women. And military women get divorced at higher rates than their peers outside the military, while military men divorce at lower rates than their civilian peers. ... Last year, 7.8 percent of women in the military got a divorce, compared with 3 percent of military men, according to Pentagon statistics. Among the military's enlisted corps, nearly 9 percent of women saw their marriages end, compared with a little more than 3 percent of the men."

This excellent article goes on to discuss many effects and possible causes of this problem, several individual cases, and some efforts to help support veterans in their personal lives.

See also:

For women in military, an elevated divorce rate - Washington Post

Survey of happiness with past decisions to divorce, to stay married, & more

David Lapp on the Family Scholars Blog reports on a  baseline statewide survey on marriage and divorce conducted just as Oklahoma was launching its statewide marriage initiative. Findings he discusses include that 1/5 of divorced women and 1/3 of divorced men wish they had worked harder to save the marriage; but 3/4 of both sexes wish their exes had. Happiness at deciding to stay married during a bad phase in the marriage was 80% in the first 7 years afterwards, and 96% after that (for those who were still married then). The survey looks at correlations with age at the time of marriage, religon, and probably many other things.

States' Divorce Rates Per Marriage Line Up Quite Differently

"Divorce Rate in the US, 2008", a short "Family Profile" sheet from Bowling Green University's National Center  for Family &  Marriage Research, reports on a more rarely calculated but much more informative version of the divorce rate -- divorces per existing marriages, instead of the standard measure, the raw per capita divorce rate. It reports:

The US rate of divorces per married couple: 1.94 % in 2008. This means one out of every 52 couples divorced that year. The lowest was North Dakota with 1.43%. The highest was DC at 3.45% (although it has recently had the LOWEST raw per capita divorce rate.) Most states, though, generally seem at first glance to be higher on this scale if they have higher raw per capita divorce rates, and vice versa. The US per capita rate, in contrast, was 0.72% of the population divorcing every year, or 0.36 divorces for every 100 people. (It's now down to 0.68%, or 0.34 divorces, etc.)

US ratio of marriages celebrated to divorce granted: 1.83 in 2008. This number ranged from 3.1 in North Dakota to 1.3 in Delaware.

Rural Divorce now equal to urban, suburban rates - NYTimes.com

Divorce is now correlated less with culture, and more with lower education, lack of economic opportunity, and educational/economic divergence within marriages, according to "Once Rare in Rural America, Divorce Is Changing the Face of Its Families" - NYTimes.com 2/23/11, By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF.

 

On the Family Scholars Blog, Amber Lapp notes that the article does not talk about the impact on children, and quotes a rural high school teacher who commented on the Times story:

... I am torn between the belief that these stats show a growing empowerment for women, while witnessing everyday what divorce does to the children. I always believed when I was in high school that divorce wasn’t a big deal, and that the children of divorce were ok. Now, as an adult, I can see first hand….they’re not. I see everyday the way these children have been affected, and it is rarely for the positive. As an English teacher the number one thing I hear about in student writing is the loss of a 2 parent household, and the damage it has caused them, even at 17 & 18. Something needs to be done to better promote positive marriages and to explain that divorce has very real repercussions for the children left after a split ...

With surveys of divorcees' self-reporting, remember: "Every opportunity to reflect on our choices is an opportunity to reconstruct a past view of ourselves as flawless decision-makers"

Would You Like This Article More If You Had To "Like" It On Facebook Before Reading? | Fast Company.

Half UK kids see parents split by 16 in divorce, cohabitation breakups; do worse

UK - Half see parents split by 16 as births outside marriage hit highest level for 200 years | Mail Online.

Via Debra Moskovitch @thesmartdivorce

Excerpts: " births outside marriage are at their highest level in two centuries ... 46 per cent of children are born to unmarried mothers, according to research by the Centre for Social Justice. ... a child growing up in a one-parent family is 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to become a drug addict, 50 per cent more likely to have an alcohol problem and 35 per cent more likely to be unemployed as an adult.

Some 48 per cent of children are likely to see their family break up before they are 16. Ten years ago, it was 40 per cent."

 

"Gavin Poole, executive director of the [Centre for Social Justice], which was set up by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, said: ‘Current high levels of cohabitation are a key factor in the rise in family breakdown in our country and this paper shows that we have not been here before. ‘Marriage and commitment tend to stabilise and strengthen families and cannot be ignored. The peculiarly high levels of family breakdown found in Britain are at the heart of the social breakdown which is devastating our most deprived communities.

 

‘Strengthening families is vital, both to the health of Britain and in ensuring a more socially just society.'"

... 

Professor Probert and Dr Callan say in their report: ‘It is not our intention to suggest that all marriages in the past were happy and long-lasting, nor that there were no examples of successful and stable cohabiting relationships.

‘But the quality of family life should be distinguished from its form. The fact that a number of marriages were brutal and fleeting should not obscure the centrality of marriage to family life in previous decades. The UK’s retreat from marriage has had negative effects for children, families and society, given that 80 per cent of relationship breakdown in young families takes place in unmarried families.

...

"The UK stands almost alone among European countries in failing to recognise traditional family structures in the tax system. 

"France, Germany, Denmark and Norway all recognise the role of stay-at-home spouses.

"In 2003, the term ‘marital status’ was deleted from official forms. Most Government-sponsored research, meanwhile, refers only to ‘couple parent families’.

 

New Gov't Overview of Best Recent Marriage/Divorce Research

Romantic Relationships: Trends, Attitudes and Social Implications - National Healthy Marriage Resource Center.

Kelly M. Roberts writes: The Healthy Marriage research collection: Trends, Attitudes and Social Implications is now up. Dan Hubler and I put a great deal of time into that project; much thanks go to coordinator Courtney Harrison, and reviewers Bill Coffin and Theo Ooms. Great reasource - quick access to many of the seminal articles building the foundation for healthy marriage.

What caused your divorce? Poll & results.

Divorce Magazine is running a poll asking men and women, separately, what caused their divorce and how they fared in the divorce. Given how hard it is to get authoritative information on this sometimes subjective question, the results of the survey, which can be viewed even while it is still going on, are about as useful and accurate as most other sources of info on this one. 

Collection of studies on many correlations w/divorce rates accompanies "Divorce Probability Calculator"

A "Divorce Probability Calculator" -- which we would probably never endorse for use in individual cases, especially because it ignores personal factors that matter a lot and focuses only on factors that are easy to self-report, study and tabulate -- includes  a long list of citations to studies on all sorts of demographic and behavioral phenomena that correlate in some way with divorce.