Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Military divorce rate keeps climbing; USAF worst, responds with Marriage Care

New stats

The divorce rate among airmen today is almost 64 percent higher than in 2001, and is the highest in the military, according to a recent Defense Department report.

A decade ago, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the rate stood at 2.5 divorces per 100 marriages. In 2011, the number jumped to 3.9. The rate has climbed steadily in the past decade except in 2005 and in 2008, when it dropped ever so slightly, according to Air Force statistics obtained by Air Force Times.

... the divorce rate military-wide is the highest it’s been since 1999; 30,000 marriages ended in divorce by the end of fiscal 2011.

Of those, 7,534 were in the Air Force. Most of them — 6,743 — were enlisted airmen, for a divorce rate of 4.6 percent.

When broken down by career field, women — both enlisted and officer — have higher divorce rates overall than their male counterparts. Of the 20 highest divorce rates by career field and gender in 2010, the most recent breakdown by career field available, only two belonged to the men: Male officers who were aides-de-camp saw a divorce rate of 4 per 100 marriages and enlisted men in the medical career field had a divorce rate of 3.92 per 100 marriages. They ranked 18th and 19th, respectively.

From "Air Force divorce rate highest in military" - Air Force Times.

Military-wide statistics were reported in an earlier story, "Military divorce rate rises slightly in 2011" - Air Force Times. Excerpts: 

... roughly one in every 27 married troops got a divorce in 2011. The percentage of marriages that ended in divorce during fiscal 2011 ticked up to 3.7 percent. The USMC rate was just slightly lower, 3.6. The officer corps divorce rate rose to 2.1 percent, up from 1.9 percent in 2010. The divorce rate for enlisted service members remained flat at 4.1.

The article on USAF divorce speculates about the reasons for divorces and for the increase, and then reports on the effects of it and what the Air Force is doing about it:

“When marriages are crumbling, it affects readiness, it affects unit morale, it affects unit cohesion,” he said. “When someone is going through a divorce, it makes it very hard for them to focus on their jobs. When an airman is going through a divorce, it affects all the airmen they work with.”

About 500 active-duty chaplains across the Air Force offer marriage counseling, but the Air Force is making a bigger push to keep marriages intact and healthy through Marriage Care retreats. Created three years ago and offered by the Chaplain Corps College, Marriage Care retreats were designed by Air Force chaplains specifically for airmen and their spouses. ... about 50 Air Force chaplains were trained to offer a Marriage Care retreat, and about 20 bases were involved in the effort. The Air Force is expanding the program as it trains more chaplains and puts more money into the program. ... in fiscal 2011 there were 31 weekend retreats, and more than 1,200 people, airmen and spouses, attended.

 

 

 

 

Divorce hurts health more at earlier ages, prevention & support needed - study

"Divorce hurts health more at earlier ages"

Michigan State University News Release 1/30/12. Excerpts:

Divorce at a younger age hurts people’s health more than divorce later in life, according to a new study by Michigan State University sociologist Hui Liu in the research journal Social Science & Medicine.  “It’s clear to me that we need more social and family support ... divorce counseling to help people handle the stress, or offering marital therapy or prevention programs to maintain marital satisfaction.”

Liu analyzed the self-reported health of 1,282 participants in Americans’ Changing Lives, a long-term national survey. She measured the gap in health status between those who remained married during the 15-year study period and those who transitioned from marriage to divorce, at certain ages and among different birth cohorts, or generations.

Liu found the gap was wider at younger ages. For example, among people born in the 1950s, those who got divorced between the ages of 35 and 41 reported more health problems in relation to their continuously married counterparts than those who got divorced in the 44 to 50 age range.

... the negative health impact was stronger for baby boomers than it was for older generations ...

Overall, the study found that those who transition from marriage to divorce experience a more rapid health decline than those who remain married. However, those who remained divorced during the entire study period showed no difference [from] those who remained married.

“This suggests it is not the status of being married or divorced, per se, that affects health, but instead is the process of transitioning from marriage to divorce that is stressful and hurts health,” Liu said.

 

 

White working class turns away from marriage, other cultural institutions - WSJ

This is the marriage-related part of Charles Murray's Wall St. Jnl. article, "The New American Divide" (1/21/12) -

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970. ...