6 ms·

Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it. Divorces/Marriages in a given year is worthless. Divorces (of people married in 1970) / Marriage

by Ntrails 12y ago

Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it. Divorces/Marriages in a given year is worthless. Divorces (of people married in 1970) / Marriages (of people married in 1970) gives you a number for that "cohort" but isn't exactly true - there are many years left for them to divorce, and that is generations ago. Personally I'd say it would be useful to look at divorce rates and marriage rates in terms of overall population and growth and argue whether (Divorces / total people married) was increasing compared to (Marriages / total people unmarried) (I'm sure a statistician can tell me I'm wrong)

throwawayaway 12y ago
marriage ends in either death or divorce, surely they can combine the stats!
geocar 12y ago
Except someone can be married and divorced multiple times (even within a single year). Counting the marriages or the divorces is a mistake. You need to count the people over time, but also not consider people who never get married.
cousin_it 12y ago
I think the main meaningful number is the chance of divorce for marriages starting today. There are probably many ways to estimate it indirectly.
nodata 12y ago
> Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it. What's wrong with "percentage of marriages that end in divorce"?
- privong 12y ago
  That can be skewed by people who marry and divorce multiple times, making "percentage of marriages that end in divorce" somewhat disconnected from the probability of any one marriage surviving.
  - nodata 12y ago
    But if people do marry and divorce multiple times, wouldn't we want the divorce rate to change with it?
    - privong 12y ago
      It depends on what one wants the "divorce rate" to mean.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Those are still marriages and divorces. I don't see any skewing. Whether you were married once and divorced once or married 6 times and divorced 6 times, all the times should be counted. The important factor is marriages/divorces not people/divorces.
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      That depends on why you are interested in measuring divorce rates.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        Is it though? I think the idea is to see how stable marriages are. And if some people have some "social dicease" that makes them marry and divorce more than others, I'd expect them to be outliers and statistical noise, compared to people that legitimate try to make it work and fail.
        jiggy2011 12y ago
        Since nobody can have a negative number of divorces, a small percentage of data points with many divorces can "skew" the statistics.
        coldtea 12y ago
        My point is that "a small percentage of data points with many divorces" will not skew the statistics much, precisely because it's small. So we don't need some with 'negative number of divorces' to balance it, we just have some error bars that don't take away from the average numbers. That's it if we did want to exclude those people in the first place. But why? A marriage is a marriage. If their 3rd marriage cannot hold, it's not that different than someone marrying once and divorcing.
- lthornberry 12y ago
  You don't know if people will divorce or not until 1) they get a divorce or 2) one of them dies instead. As a result, we can only reliably calculate this percentage for the cohort of couples who married 50+ years ago. We have many reasons to assume that couples marrying now, or who married ten years ago, will not divorce at the same rate as those who married 50 years ago. As another poster says, we can estimate based on historical comparisons and other data. The NY Times article referenced in the link shows some of that: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-divorce-rate-is-falling.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-div.... But we can't measure it directly. And we may get surprised - the number of people currently divorcing in their 50s and older is at a historic high, which wouldn't have been predicted by comparisons to previous cohorts.
- losvedir 12y ago
  Ha, this is exactly the issue we ran into at my start-up when trying to determine KPI's. My start-up is a marketplace that connects coaches and athletes, so we wanted KPI's like "What % of clients rebook their coach?". But the issue there is the same as marriage stats: You can't just do a simple (# of rebookings / # of bookings), because that will get skewed if, say, are marketing push generates a ton of new bookings. So then you think, "okay, the denominator should be first-time bookings and the numerator should be how many of those have a later re-booking?" But then you need to give that a chance to happen, because what if someone comes back a year or two later to re-book? Conversely, recent bookings won't have had a chance for the rebooking to happen, so again a wave of brand new bookings will skew the number unfairly. Ultimately, I think we settled on the "right" decision: cap the time frame, and frame it not as a "rebooking rate" but a "1 month rebooking rate": i.e., "what percentage of new bookings have a re-booking within 1 month?" That one will always generate a correct number, but the disadvantage is your cohort is at least one month old. So, the same issue applies here with divorce. The only accurate number you can calculate is something like "What is the 20-year divorce rate?" But then you're looking at marriages that occurred a generation ago, so it's not very predictive of marriages that just happened today.
snowwrestler 12y ago
I'd be interested in the "survival rate" of marriages that end in divorce, like they calculate for chronic diseases. What's the 5-year survival rate for a marriage across the population? What's the 10-year rate, or 20-year rate? You could segment such data pretty easily by other factors, like region, ethnicity, age at wedding, etc.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  There are a number of studies that gather that kind of data, e.g. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorc...

by Ntrails 12y ago

throwawayaway 12y ago

marriage ends in either death or divorce, surely they can combine the stats!

geocar 12y ago

Except someone can be married and divorced multiple times (even within a single year). Counting the marriages or the divorces is a mistake. You need to count the people over time, but also not consider people who never get married.

cousin_it 12y ago

I think the main meaningful number is the chance of divorce for marriages starting today. There are probably many ways to estimate it indirectly.

nodata 12y ago

> Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it. What's wrong with "percentage of marriages that end in divorce"?

privong 12y ago
That can be skewed by people who marry and divorce multiple times, making "percentage of marriages that end in divorce" somewhat disconnected from the probability of any one marriage surviving.
- nodata 12y ago
  But if people do marry and divorce multiple times, wouldn't we want the divorce rate to change with it?
  - privong 12y ago
    It depends on what one wants the "divorce rate" to mean.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Those are still marriages and divorces. I don't see any skewing. Whether you were married once and divorced once or married 6 times and divorced 6 times, all the times should be counted. The important factor is marriages/divorces not people/divorces.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    That depends on why you are interested in measuring divorce rates.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      Is it though? I think the idea is to see how stable marriages are. And if some people have some "social dicease" that makes them marry and divorce more than others, I'd expect them to be outliers and statistical noise, compared to people that legitimate try to make it work and fail.
      - jiggy2011 12y ago
        Since nobody can have a negative number of divorces, a small percentage of data points with many divorces can "skew" the statistics.
        coldtea 12y ago
        My point is that "a small percentage of data points with many divorces" will not skew the statistics much, precisely because it's small. So we don't need some with 'negative number of divorces' to balance it, we just have some error bars that don't take away from the average numbers. That's it if we did want to exclude those people in the first place. But why? A marriage is a marriage. If their 3rd marriage cannot hold, it's not that different than someone marrying once and divorcing.
lthornberry 12y ago
You don't know if people will divorce or not until 1) they get a divorce or 2) one of them dies instead. As a result, we can only reliably calculate this percentage for the cohort of couples who married 50+ years ago. We have many reasons to assume that couples marrying now, or who married ten years ago, will not divorce at the same rate as those who married 50 years ago. As another poster says, we can estimate based on historical comparisons and other data. The NY Times article referenced in the link shows some of that: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-divorce-rate-is-falling.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-div.... But we can't measure it directly. And we may get surprised - the number of people currently divorcing in their 50s and older is at a historic high, which wouldn't have been predicted by comparisons to previous cohorts.
losvedir 12y ago
Ha, this is exactly the issue we ran into at my start-up when trying to determine KPI's. My start-up is a marketplace that connects coaches and athletes, so we wanted KPI's like "What % of clients rebook their coach?". But the issue there is the same as marriage stats: You can't just do a simple (# of rebookings / # of bookings), because that will get skewed if, say, are marketing push generates a ton of new bookings. So then you think, "okay, the denominator should be first-time bookings and the numerator should be how many of those have a later re-booking?" But then you need to give that a chance to happen, because what if someone comes back a year or two later to re-book? Conversely, recent bookings won't have had a chance for the rebooking to happen, so again a wave of brand new bookings will skew the number unfairly. Ultimately, I think we settled on the "right" decision: cap the time frame, and frame it not as a "rebooking rate" but a "1 month rebooking rate": i.e., "what percentage of new bookings have a re-booking within 1 month?" That one will always generate a correct number, but the disadvantage is your cohort is at least one month old. So, the same issue applies here with divorce. The only accurate number you can calculate is something like "What is the 20-year divorce rate?" But then you're looking at marriages that occurred a generation ago, so it's not very predictive of marriages that just happened today.

snowwrestler 12y ago

I'd be interested in the "survival rate" of marriages that end in divorce, like they calculate for chronic diseases. What's the 5-year survival rate for a marriage across the population? What's the 10-year rate, or 20-year rate? You could segment such data pretty easily by other factors, like region, ethnicity, age at wedding, etc.

dragonwriter 12y ago
There are a number of studies that gather that kind of data, e.g. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorc...