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