That can be skewed by people who marry and divorce multiple times, making "percentage of marriages that end in divorce" somewhat disconnected from the probability of any one marriage surviving.
back
4 comments
Actually, it is very much connected to the probability of any one randomly selected marriage failing. Any specific marriage, of course, you'll want to look at the rates of similarly-situated marriages (the same sources that give numbers in the neighborhood fo 50% for the overall divorce rate often report different rates for, e.g., first vs. subsequent marriages, and those that I've seen have consistently had lower divorce rates for first marriages and increasing divorce rates for each subsequent marriage.)
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.
But if people do marry and divorce multiple times, wouldn't we want the divorce rate to change with it?
It depends on what one wants the "divorce rate" to mean.
Those are still marriages and divorces. I don't see any skewing.
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.
That depends on why you are interested in measuring divorce rates.
Is it though? I think the idea is to see how stable marriages are.
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.
I think you just explained why the simple ratio: (# of divorces / # of marriages) is prone to difficulty. The ratio is artificially skewed by people who marry/divorce frequently. So the simple ratio may not actually tell you much about how stable marriages are.
Since nobody can have a negative number of divorces, a small percentage of data points with many divorces can "skew" the statistics.
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.
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.
>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.
Give the two numbers (#divorce/#marriages) and (#divorced/married_individuals). Some stats may not be summarized in one number only.