Quote:
Originally posted by jbrooks544
What statistics are you talking about? I hope it isn't that 50% fallacy!
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In all the studies (please note: multiple) I've read about in my textbooks, it has been consistently 50% of all first marriages. I will quote from my two current textbooks.
Human Sexuality in a World of Diversity, Fifth Edition, 2002.
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At least half of the marriage in the United States end in divorce (Carrère et al., 2000; Laumann et al., 1994). The divorce rate in the United States rose steadily through much of the twentieth century before leveling off in the 1980s. About one quarter (26%) of children below the age of 18 live in single-parent households (Barringer, 1991). Divorced women outnumber divorced men, in part because men are more likely to remarry following divorce (Saluter, 1992).
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Psychology, Third Edition, 2003.
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For example, the number of unmarried couples living together increased dramatically at the end of the twentieth century--to well over 3 million couples. Currently, more than 30 percent of children are being raised by a single parent (Rawlings & Saluter, 1995). Given that more than half of all first marriages end in divorce, the phenomenon of remarrying and starting a "second family" later in life is not unusual (Karney & Bradbury, 1995). [...]
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So from this, you can gather that three studies concur with the 50% divorce rate. If you didn't catch them, these are the three studies (in order of appearance):
Carrère, S., Buehlman, K. T., Gottman, J. M., Coan, J. A., & Ruckstuhl, L. (2000). Predicting marital stbility and divorce in newlywed couples.
Journal of Family Psychology, 14(1), 42-58.
Laumann, E. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., & Michaels, S. (1994).
The social organization of sexuality: Sexual practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Karney, Benjamin R., & Bradbury, Thomas N. (1995). The longitudinal course of marital quality and stability: A review of theory, method, and research.
Psychological Bulletin, 118(1), 3-34.
Personally, I am skeptical of all pollsters. It's so easy to skew a question in order to get the answer you want to hear. I prefer to rely on professional journals and college publications because all articles must go through a review process where their colleagues verify their information and reliability (definition: if you repeat the process, you get similar enough results). Three separate studies done in different years and from different publications all concur with the 50% statistic. I'm also confident that if I took the time to use google, I could find similar studies done with similar results. Ultimately though, it's up to you to decide on which sources of information to rely.
p.s.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030124.html