Study implying divorce more likely when wives fall ill gets axed (2015)
retractionwatch.com
retractionwatch.com
This is p-hacking after-the-fact, right? Seems like the classic example: The broader hypothesis doesn’t hold, but if you look for ways to slice and dice the data you’re likely to find a (spurious?) correlation eventually.
xkcd/882
The blog post list this as the original Stata code:
> replace event`i’ = 1 if delta_mct`i’ != 0 | spouse_delta_mct`i’ != 0
and this as the correct one:
> replace event`i’ = 1 if (delta_mct`i’ != 0 | spouse_delta_mct`i’ != 0) & delta_mct`i’ != . & spouse_delta_mct`i’ != .
It looks like the authors didn't properly handle missing values in Stata, leading to marking people with missing health information being marked as being "severely ill" instead of being excluded from the analysis.
It's an unfortunate mistake, but it happens.
(Honest question)
You're saying the original analysis was wrong due to a coding error. I believe that's also true, but that's not what they were discussing. The variable names are inscrutable, but the article text also seems to imply that line (mis)codes divorce, not severe illness:
> People who left the study were actually miscoded as getting divorced.
So they actually found a correlation between severe illness and leaving the study. That's perhaps intuitive, if those people were too busy managing their illness to respond.
Although you're right that there's likely no relationship between wives developing heart conditions and subsequent divorce, there's not enough information from the article to know whether there's anything statistically meaningful about heart conditions specifically. It seems more likely that it's just statistical noise. I read that section and got the impression that the relationship is interesting but it doesn't necessarily mean anything, rather than implying that the original study still has some validity.
For another, the study doesn’t look at that many diseases, just four: cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and stroke. It’s possible the original study was doing some p-hacking in order to reach significance but these are pretty major categories of disease so they seem defensible. It would not surprise me if these are the only diseases in the original dataset.
Finally, the results are significant at the .01 level. Combined with the number of diseases, this is not anything as blatant as the classic XKCD green jellybean comic, although more subtle p-hacking could be at play.
Retracted: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/002214651456835...
Corrected: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002214651559635... (Not open access but it’s available from sci-hub.)
I take issue with this framing. Starting with saying that when women get sick, risk of divorce elevates, immediately followed by saying this happens only in one type of sickness is still very misleading. The entire first sentence is misrepresenting the actual findings.
Pure speculation, ofc ;)
Me not ending the marriage sooner - this was reasonably questioned. Some of that was me being a guy.
Ugh, that sounds familiar.
Having to deal with a mentally ill relative (dementia) presently, and it's no fun at all that he constantly makes stuff up and lies to everyone about everything. :(
Also no fun that he's manipulative as hell, and switches to tantrum level anger at the drop of a hat. (ugh x 10)
And everything is always someone else's fault, 100% of the time. :(
Hunker down indeed.
Long-term in-patient mental healthcare was a thing in the US, late 19th-early 20th century. Sanitariums were built with the best of intentions and provided the best care we knew how. Some of the care was awful because our understanding isn't what it is now. Some of the care was outstanding, even by today's standards.
The visionaries who started them died off and dollars increasingly outweighed the well-being of patients. Sanitariums eventually degenerated into hellholes and were held up as an example of [vague negatives about public mental healthcare]. In the 1980s, dollars won a total victory; many institution were shuttered. Their mentally ill patients transitioned into homelessness and here we are.
My ex needs long-term, in-patient mental healthcare. She's a vet on SS disability and has Medicaid, Medicare and VA. Even with that, long term, inpatient care isn't available for her. Wealth is the only option that could get her the help she needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_Health_and_Wellbein...
The companies are owned by a church, so even though wildly profitable don't pay any tax due to their owner being a religious organisation. :( :( :(
Just casually dismissing it as "fakery" removes the opportunity to learn from it.
P-hacking is so endemic and so essential to modern academia, especially in the 'softer' sciences, that the whole thing is beyond saving. It's so bad that anyone who understands statistics well enough to know that most of their peers works are bogus are much more likely to be shunned than embraced because of this knowledge which is an incredible disincentive to acquiring it.
Edit: as I can’t reply to the now dead account, the first quote explains why academia cannot keep claiming innocence on such matters. The rest of my comment was my explanation as to why nothing is being done about it. Sure, we can ask them to do better but they should already know that.
Errors will always happen; they are more likely to result in shocking, surprising results; and the press actively publicizes those results over others. The original paper got widespread press coverage, and its retraction got... Much less. You end up much dumber if you outsource your thinking to the Washington Post or Facebook.
Do you mean that the original study was fake or the second study that found the discrepancy is fake? Is the retraction fake?
The one divorce I can think of in my extended family came from the onset of heart problems. Properly speaking, it was the abortion she had that caused the divorce, not the fact that she would have died otherwise.
we could short circuit these association choices if the hosts could become unburdened while the fetus is able to live
But this is a stopgap until they can be grown as readymade adults, skipping the tedious and problematic child stage altogether.
It’s pretty clear that it will be the state who assumes receivership of the fetus and subsequent human with full constitutional rights.
It’s also a pretty easy legislative problem to say the state is transferring unwanted fetuses, despite the technology for its viability not currently existing. The outcome shifts the burden of guilt - or lack thereof - away from the parent(s), over to an immune state regardless of that state’s laws on abortion. And it shifts priorities and funding measures on creating the technology to ensure a fetus’ viability, whether that turns out to be a fool's errand or not.
This will easily bridge consensus between “camps” as the discomfort over citizens killing fetus turns into a market choice instead of a legislative debate. What will the market primarily choose to end a pregnancy
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statist...
However, my judgment was insufficient and I didn't properly recognize that sustaining the marriage was harming our kids.
In an earlier time, the harm would have been much less. Kids (my generation & earlier) once had direct, relationship-level access to a number of caring, invested adults - related and not.
My kids had the two of us 24/7 and that's about it. My wife and I had 10x the parenting demands (time) put upon us that my parents, grandparents-> adults through human history had.