So what's the actual number? The article doesn't say. It's kinda rambling.
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) (Marriages / total people unmarried)
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.
What's wrong with "percentage of marriages that end in divorce"?
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.
It doesn't make sense to exclude some marriages from something and calling it the overall divorce rate, even if there are cases where the most interesting divorce rate isn't the overall rate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It mentions numbers from 16 percent (those married between 1990 and 1994) to 41% (men who were then between the ages of 50 to 59 [in 2001]). They agree that the divorce rate has been declining, particularly among college grads.
If you dig into it, most of the divorces are people 50-59 who married when the marriage rate was much higher.
The marriage rate has gone down over time because more people are choosing not to marry.
You can think of it as either a depressed marriage rate or an inflated divorce rate, but large number of people getting divorced who were married 30 years ago is unrelated to the number of people being married today.