3 ms·

Since nobody can have a negative number of divorces, a small percentage of data points with many divorces can "skew" the statistics.

by jiggy2011 12y ago

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.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  But you don't know how small the effect is unless you measure! If 90% of the population marry once and never divorce but the remaining 10% marry and then divorce 5 times this means that the divorce rate is 36%. The article mentions that divorce rate is usually quoted to support some political platform rather than for it's own sake. For example a politician talking about the breakdown of the nuclear family. If you want to measure how divorce affects nuclear families then you should include only marriages that produced offspring. You should probably also exclude divorces that happened after the children left home. You might get a very different stat.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >But you don't know how small the effect is unless you measure! The very final actual number no. But as with most things in life we can have a sense (based on what you know and see around us in society) of it's scale. In this case, I don't think "percentage of people with multiple marriages" is such a difficult and exotic subject to consider that our guesses will be that far off them mark. >If 90% of the population marry once and never divorce but the remaining 10% marry and then divorce 5 times this means that the divorce rate is 36%. That's only if the calculation is based on naive average. You can get percentiles, medians, etc. "90% of the population marry once and never divorce" is already a valid metric.

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.

jiggy2011 12y ago
But you don't know how small the effect is unless you measure! If 90% of the population marry once and never divorce but the remaining 10% marry and then divorce 5 times this means that the divorce rate is 36%. The article mentions that divorce rate is usually quoted to support some political platform rather than for it's own sake. For example a politician talking about the breakdown of the nuclear family. If you want to measure how divorce affects nuclear families then you should include only marriages that produced offspring. You should probably also exclude divorces that happened after the children left home. You might get a very different stat.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >But you don't know how small the effect is unless you measure! The very final actual number no. But as with most things in life we can have a sense (based on what you know and see around us in society) of it's scale. In this case, I don't think "percentage of people with multiple marriages" is such a difficult and exotic subject to consider that our guesses will be that far off them mark. >If 90% of the population marry once and never divorce but the remaining 10% marry and then divorce 5 times this means that the divorce rate is 36%. That's only if the calculation is based on naive average. You can get percentiles, medians, etc. "90% of the population marry once and never divorce" is already a valid metric.