Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Do disabled kids cause divorce? Overall, no, but family size matters.

Are Divorce Rates Really Higher for Parents of Kids With Disabilities?

By Calleen Petersen in The Mighty•March 23, 2018

 

However, see also:

While it is positive to hear that an oft-cited report that 80% of parents of a child with autism get divorced has been since debunked, there does exist a gap between marriage success of parents who do and do not face challenges with their child’s development. On the issue of the autism spectrum disorder, the numbers were re-examined in a different study that found a 10% increase in the chance of parents getting divorced if their child was diagnosed. While this is not the 80% more likely, it’s still a disappointment.

 

From "The Unfortunate Reality of Divorce in Couples with a Child with Special Needs" at cerebralpalsy.org

 

Citing:

80 Percent Autism Divorce Rate Debunked in First-Of-Its Kind Scientific Study: Kennedy Krieger researchers find autism does not affect family structure

May 19, 2010, Kennedy Krieger Institute

 

and

Parents of autistic kids have higher divorce rate

By Tia Ghose in the Journal Sentinel, 8/9/2010

  

 

 

Nature predicts divorce more strongly than nurture -- study

We used classical and extended adoption designs in Swedish registries to disentangle genetic and rearing-environment influences on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. ... Adoptees ... resembled their biological parents, rather than their adoptive parents, in their history of divorce. In extended adoption analyses, offspring ... resembled their not-lived-with fathers and their lived-with mothers. There was stronger resemblance to lived-with mothers, providing indirect evidence of rearing-environment influences on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. The heritability of divorce assessed across generations was 0.13. We attempted to replicate our findings using within-generation data from adoptive and biological siblings ... . Adoptees resembled their biological, not adoptive, siblings in their history of divorce. Thus, there was consistent evidence that genetic factors contributed to the intergenerational transmission of divorce but weaker evidence for a rearing-environment effect of divorce. Within-generation data from siblings supported these conclusions. 

 "Genetics, the Rearing Environment, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce: A Swedish National Adoption Study"

Jessica E. Salvatore, Sara Larsson Lönn, Jan Sundquist, Kristina Sundquist, Kenneth S. Kendler

 

in Psychological Science, January 18, 2018

In a study of "nearly 20,000 children adopted before the age of 10. They estimate that children with biological parents who were divorced were a little over 20% more likely get divorced themselves. As for the effect of having divorced adoptive parents? It had no impact at all."

[That last part isn't quite right, according to the study's abstract. There were correlations with both, but the "nature" links were stronger than the "nurture" links.]

A study found a link between genetics and divorce. Should we believe it?

Dan Kopf in Quartz

Cumulative/Lifetime Divorce Rates Sorted by Education, Employment, Ethnicity

Divorce Rates for Different Groups

By NATHAN YAU on  DATA UNDERLOAD, 3/30/16 (using data through 2014)

The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On: CUMULATIVE Stats Tell a More Relevant Story

"About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary, up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s.Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce. 

"The decline in divorce is concentrated among people with college degrees. For the less educated, divorce rates are closer to those of the peak divorce years. Of college-educated people who married in the early 2000s, only about 11 percent divorced by their seventh anniversary, the last year for which data is available. Among people without college degrees, 17 percent were divorced."

Condensed from:

The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On: Cumulative share of marriages ending in divorce

 

By Claire Cain Miller  in the New York Times, 12/2/14

 

But I heartily disagree with Justin Wolfers's explanation for this (or what looks like his explanation after the reporter and editors get through with it): 

“It’s just love now,” Mr. Wolfers said. “We marry to find our soul mate, rather than a good homemaker or a good earner.”

Being a good earner has always been important in the marriage market. Just ask the President.

Actuaries divorce least, casino managers most: rates by occupation from 2015 American Community Survey

Divorce and Occupation

BY NATHAN YAU  ON DATA UNDERLOAD

Family Instability in Appalachia

The Appalachian Go-Round: Family Instability in America’s Highland

by Lyman Stone, @LYMANSTONEKY

Divorce rate NOT 50%: maybe 33% if current trends go on; 28.5% if educated, 38% if not; 17 to 42% depending on race

44% if Native American

42% if Black

37% if White

28.5% if Hispanic

17% if Asian 

 

Who gets divorced in America, in 7 charts

By Ana Swanson, April 6, 2016, on The Washington Post's Wonkblog

Based on 

Divorce Rates for Different Groups

POSTED TO DATA UNDERLOAD  by  NATHAN YAU on flowingdata.com

And on 

The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On

 By Claire Cain Miller @clairecm DEC. 2, 2014 in The New York Times's "The Upshot"

 

Another story based on the same source:

See How Your Likelihood Of Divorce Changes With Age, Education, And Ethnicity

The most important finding? Contrary to popular belief, you are more likely to stay married than get divorced.

By CHARLIE SORREL, 04.05.16 on fastcoexist.com

Marital status mapped county by county nationwide

Relationship Status Geography

BY NATHAN YAU  /  POSTED TO DATA UNDERLOAD  on flowingdata.com

Divorce/Margarine, Drowning/Marriage ... This Cluster of Correlations Couldn't be Coincidence

Divorce and margarine went in and (deservedly) out of fashion together, as everyone knows who thinks about it for a moment and is old enough to remember. And now, as marriage continues its long decline, Kentucky fishing-boat drownings do too, probably since marriage makes you want to go out alone in a small boat with nothing but a case of beer and your fishing gear. Seriously, how many of those guys out there fishing do you think are single? Single guys are probably somewhere where they're more likely to meet single women.

And yet Tyler VIgen refers to these and many others as "Spurious Correlations." These are among a top-ten list that also includes murders with hot objects, death from getting tangled in the bedsheets, Nicholas Cage movies, cheese-eating, moon-landing, suicide, Miss America,video games, killer spiders, spelling bees, and Ph.D.s.

Spurious Correlations

10 more here:

The 10 Most Bizarre Correlations

And here's ten that riff on another commonly reported form of statistic or study, not a correlation of change over time, but studies where a subset of respondents who have a particular response also show a different mixture of responses to a completely different question than is representative of the entire study pool. Stuff like, 60% of divorced people preferred chocolate ice cream compared to 80% of the general population.

10 Crazy Correlations Between Unrelated Things

By Gus Lubin and Tony Manfred

 

But wait, there's more correlations, marked in some damn good and genuinely important articles:

How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization

BY DAVID HOPKINS

 

And cutting a wider swath but coming to about the same conclusion, although blaming not sitcoms but the reality shows that mostly replaced them ...

Postapocalyptic hellscape by Jacob T. Levy

 

(h/t Jason Rylander and Todd Seavey) 

In-depth picture of divorce in Spain offers interesting contrasts

Spain's National Institute of Statistics has released an in-depth report on contemporary divorce in Spain as of 2014. Highlights:

• The per-capita divorce rate (including annulments and separations) is 0.23% (i.e., 0.46% of the whole population gets divorced each year, since a divorce involves two people).That was a 5.4% increase over 2013. The 2014 rate was the same as the US's third-lowest-divorce state, Louisiana. The report breaks rates down by region; they ranged from 0.18% (still higher than our lowest-divorce state, Iowa) to 2.8% (still low by US standards, the same as long-time low-divorce states RI,NY, NJ, SD & ND).
• 95% of these cases were divorces, 5% were separations, and 0.1% were annulments.
• 76% were by mutual consent; 24% were contested. But separations were 85% mutual-consent. 
• 76% of divorces and 86% of separations took six months or less from court filing to resolution. Median duration was 4.4 months. The median for mutual-consent cases was 2.8 months, and for contested cases it was 9.6 months.
• 57% of cases were jointly filed. 27% were filed by the wife, 16% by the husband.
• The median length of marriages at the time of divorce, legal separation or annulment was 15.8 years. The median for divorce was 15.4 years, and for legal separation it was 22.2 years. For annulments, 7.4 years. 30% of divorces were in marriages of 20 years or more. 23.5% were in marriages of 6 to 10 years.
•  The highest-divorce age bracket for both men and women was the forties. Median age at divorce was 45 for men, 42 for women; at legal separation, 50 for men, 48 for women.
• 53% of cases involved minor children, and another 4% involved "dependent adult" children. Only 21% of cases with minor children included shared custody (up from 18% in 2013). There was no indication of how shared custody was defined. 73% of mothers and 5% of fathers had sole custody.
• 58% of cases included child support orders. 78% of these were payable by the man, 5% by the woman, and 17% were by both. 10% of cases include spousal support, and in 92% of those, the payor is the man.
• In 85% of cases, both parties were Spanish. In 11%, one party was foreign, and in 6%, both were. (Note rounding)
• Most of the statistics above carefully stated that they only covered heterosexual cases.

 

"Statistics on Annulments, Separations and Divorces, Year 2014"; National Institute of Statistics, Press Notes, Sept. 15, 2015.