{"id":18440,"date":"2010-01-04T10:50:36","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T15:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=18440"},"modified":"2013-12-15T04:36:29","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T09:36:29","slug":"guest-post-recession-resilience-divorce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/01\/04\/guest-post-recession-resilience-divorce\/","title":{"rendered":"Recession, Resilience, Divorce?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please welcome Guest Blogger Philip Cohen.\u00a0 Cohen is a sociology professor\u00a0at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he specializes in studying the family.\u00a0 We are pleased to reproduce a post <\/a>from his own blog, Family Inequality<\/a>, about (how statistics lie and) the recent media hype about the decrease in the divorce rate.<\/p>\n

—————————————-<\/p>\n

Delivering some \u201cgood news for Christmas<\/a>,\u201d The National Marriage Project, under the editorship of the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, has released a report titled The State of Our Unions, 2009: Money and Marriage<\/em><\/a>. It has a lot of useful information on marriage and families, with some editorial bending in the pro-marriage-and-family direction.<\/p>\n

My beef here is with the chapter titled \u201cThe Great Recession\u2019s Silver Lining?\u201d In it, Wilcox writes:<\/p>\n

judging by divorce trends, many couples appear to be developing a new appreciation for the economic and social support that marriage can provide in tough times. Thus, one piece of good news emerging from the last two years is that marital stability is up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That line was quoted<\/a> by Ross Douthat at the New York Times<\/em>, which is a shame, because there is no evidence about anyone\u2019s appreciation for marriage in the chapter. Instead, the evidence for this assertion is presented in a graph that shows three data points in the divorce-rate trend:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The figure shows a decline in the divorce rate from 2007 to 2008. In the press release<\/a> he calls that drop \u201cthe first annual dip since 2005.\u201d (The rate shown here is divorces in a given year per 1,000 married women in the population that year.) Couple things:<\/p>\n

1. There is no data point for 2006, so for all we know the divorce rate actually rose higher than it was in 2007, and started falling before the recession, which officially began in December 2007.<\/p>\n

2. Despite the dramatic turnaround apparent in this graph, it\u2019s really not enough to go on to draw the kind of conclusion he draws.<\/p>\n

The second point is more important, because there really is a lot of research that shows job loss increases the odds of divorce. So why should this recession be different? It\u2019s possible it is, but there\u2019s no evidence \u2013 in this report or elsewhere that I\u2019ve seen \u2013 of such a change.<\/p>\n

In fairness, Wilcox wrote a column<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal that musters some anecdotal evidence for his theory. But nothing to get him this far: \u201cFor most married Americans, the Great Recession seems to be solidifying, not eroding, the marital bond.\u201d Even if the divorce did drop a little in one year \u2013 that doesn\u2019t say anything about \u201cmost married Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

That three-point graph is especially unfortunate because it leads to interpretations like this<\/a>: \u201cThe divorce rate \u2026 had previously been on an upward path, rising from 16.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005 to 17.5 in 2007.\u201d That seriously misstates the real trend in divorce rates, which have actually been falling since 1981. And there is nothing in the trend to suggest that recessions teach couples a \u201cnew appreciation for the economic and social support that marriage can provide in tough times.\u201d In the appendix, Wilcox presents that longer trend, which makes his previous figure seem much less dramatic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(The graph seems a little off to me \u2013 notice how 10.6 is closer to the line for 10 than 14.9 is to the line for 15 \u2013 but I\u2019ll work from his numbers below anyway.)<\/p>\n

I think the story of a turnaround in divorce rates has traction because, like crime, divorce is one of those things many people assume is always getting worse (I see this in student papers frequently). So any decline in divorce rates looks like an important change.<\/p>\n

What is recession\u2019s effect?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I previously speculated<\/a> that, because this recession was costing so many men their jobs, more men were likely to be become primary caregivers, and do more housework. The downside \u2013 I speculated \u2013 was that \u201cmaybe men getting \u2019stuck\u2019 with childcare doesn\u2019t bode well for marriages.\u201d To support that speculation, I showed a graph of divorce rates that had little upward spikes during some recent recessions. The graph was not the real evidence for the argument \u2013 which was here:<\/p>\n

We already know that economic hard times contribute to marital instability and divorce. Study<\/a>after study<\/a> after study<\/a> have found that losing a job increases the likelihood of divorce, with some evidence<\/a> that husbands\u2019 losses matter more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is a new graph I made, with the \u201ccrude divorce rate\u201d (divorces per 1,000 people in the population) in blue, superimposed over Wilcox\u2019s calculations in red. (His takes more work, which is probably why he doesn\u2019t have it for every year. But they track quite well, with some pulling apart some after 1980, which has to do with changes in the population composition that probably aren\u2019t important.) I also put the recessions on there, roughly, by hand with purple bars.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Divorce rates from 2010 <\/em>Statistical Abstract<\/em><\/a> and various prior years; business cycles from 2010 <\/em>Statistical Abstract<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two things here:<\/p>\n

1. Over the longer run, there is no obvious relationship between recessions and the divorce rate. There are big social forces at work here (like the rise of the legal practice of no-fault divorce, the increase in women\u2019s education and employment, the growing tendency of men and women of similar education levels to marry, later age at marriage, more cohabitation and unmarried childbearing, etc.). But on the surface \u2013 which is where the Wilcox conclusion is drawn \u2013 there is not much to go on.<\/p>\n

2. The crude divorce rate I got from the Statistical Abstracts<\/em> shows a little peak in 2006 \u2013 not 2007 \u2013 followed by two consecutive years of decline, beginning before the recession. So rather than talk about the reason for the decline in the last year \u2013 which really just fits in with the falling divorce rates since 1981 \u2013 the anomaly is 2006. I have no explanation for that, but in the long run it probably doesn\u2019t matter much.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers has surveyed its members twice since the recession started. In the first release<\/a> last fall, they said 37% expected a drop in divorce filings, compared with 19% who usually see an increase during recessions. This fall they report<\/a> that 57% of their members experienced a drop in filings, with just 14% seeing an increase. There are no details or methods reported in these releases, so it\u2019s hard to evaluate. But if it\u2019s true \u2013 along with the previous evidence that unemployment increases divorce \u2013 then it maybe that recessions delay the timing of divorce filings while increasing the divorce rate for those affected in the long run.<\/p>\n

On the third hand, Jay Livingston at Montclair State\u00a0points out<\/a> that the NY Times reports<\/a> that, in New York\u2019s recession-year court backlog, \u00a0\u201dCases involving charges like assault by family members were up 18 percent statewide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether delayed divorce filings contribute to family violence is a question someone might be able to answer when they put all this together. But\u00a0I doubt the final word will end up as simple as, \u201cCouples too broke to bicker<\/a>,\u201d as heartwarming as that is. There may be something to the speculation that falling home prices are stalling some divorce plans<\/a>, but that is not quite the same as developing a newfound appreciation for the benefits of marriage.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sticking with this: in hard times, families are a big part of how people make it through, but hard times are also hard for a lot of marriages. If it\u2019s true that the husband\u2019s job loss especially increases stress on a marriage \u2013 as previous research suggests \u2013 we may yet see that emerge for the current crisis. If not, maybe something has changed.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please welcome Guest Blogger Philip Cohen.\u00a0 Cohen is a sociology professor\u00a0at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he specializes in studying the family.\u00a0 We are pleased to reproduce a post from his own blog, Family Inequality, about (how statistics lie and) the recent media hype about the decrease in the divorce rate. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,12498,253,272,274],"class_list":["post-18440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-economics-great-recession","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-methodsuse-of-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18440"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60593,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18440\/revisions\/60593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}