Now-you-know data graphic series

As I go about my day, revising my textbook, arguing with Trump supporters online, and looking at data, I keep an eye out for easily-told data short stories. I’ve been putting them on Twitter under the label Now You Know, and people seem to appreciate it, so here are some of them. Happy to discuss implications or data issues in the comments.

1. The percentage of women with a child under age 1 rose rapidly to the late 1990s and then stalled out. The difference between these two lines is the percentage of such women who have a job but were not at work the week of the survey, which may mean they are on leave. That gap is also not growing much anymore, which might or might not be good.

2. In the long run both the dramatic rise and complete stall of women’s employment rates are striking. I’m not as agitated about the decline in employment rates for men as some are, but it’s there, too.

3. What looked in 2007 like a big shift among mothers away from paid work as an ideal — greater desire for part-time work among employed mothers, more desire for no work among at-home mothers — hasn’t held up. From a repeated Pew survey. Maybe people have looked this from other sources, too, so we can tell whether these are sample fluctuations or more durable swings.

4. Over age 50 or so divorce is dominated by people who’ve been married more than once, especially in the range 65-74 — Baby Boomers, mostly — where 60% of divorcers have been married more than once.

 

5. People with higher levels of education receive more of the child support they are supposed to get.

 

Marriage update: less divorce, and less sex

I previously reported that divorce rates in the American Community Survey have fallen a fair amount since 2008, and especially from 2012 to 2014; and the experts at Bowling Green’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) have reported that the trend continued through 2015.

Now, as I revise my book with the data through 2015, I estimated divorce rates in the American Community Survey across some key predictors to see if the decline since the first edition was concentrated in any particular group. The answer is mostly no, it’s across the board. Here, shown as the number of people in each year who said they divorced per 1000 people in that year that are married (click to enlarge).

The exception is across years married, which I show here instead of age. The 2012-2015 drops in divorce are largest among people married for the shortest duration, and for those married 35-49 years the rate actually increased. For more on this, see the great NCFMR work on “gray divorce.” Interestingly this happens as attitudes toward divorce are becoming steadily more permissive. (See the divorce tag for lots more on all this.)

Anyway, when I posted this on Twitter yesterday Jean Twenge reminded me of this article showing the trend toward less sex in America from 1989 to 2014, concentrated among married people. And that reminded me that the 2016 General Social Survey just came out, so we can update the reported sexual frequency trend.

To do this quick and dirty (no offense) I just ran a linear regression on the categorical GSS variable SEXFREQ, controlling for sex, age, and age-squared, for married people ages 18-54.* The results show the downhill trend Twenge and colleagues reported, and then a pretty dramatic drop in 2016, the biggest drop in the series. Yikes.

The variable SEXFREQ asks, “About how often did you have sex during the last 12 months?” with the options Not at all, Once or twice, Once a month, 2-3 times a month, Weekly, 2-3 times per week, and 4+ times per week. For reference, the figure is running from weekly down toward 2-3 times per month. I don’t take this literally, which is why I don’t mind treating it as linear, it’s just about the direction of change and the ballpark level. Others may disagree with this method.

So, that’s the news: divorce is down, and so is sex within marriage (as reported to survey takers). Open to interpretations.

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* Here’s the Stata code:

reg sexfreq i.year i.sex c.age##c.age if age
margins
marginsplot

(And then I tinkered with the figure.)

Here’s the distribution of SEXFREQ, weighted, in 2016, for married people age 18-54:

	Percent
not at all	3.1
once or twice	9.4
once a month	14.6
2-3 times a month	22.4
weekly	22.4
2-3 per week	22.2
4+ per week	5.9

How low is too low for divorce?

I have no idea, but I raised the possibility that there is a too low in this essay for Timeline.

I wrote:

We should ask whether falling divorce rates are always a good thing. Most people getting married would like to think they’ll stay together for the long haul, but what is the right amount of divorce for a society to have?

It seems like an odd question, but divorce really isn’t like crime. Less crime is inarguably good, but we do want some divorces. Otherwise it means people are stuck in bad marriages. If you have no divorce that means even abusive marriages can’t break up. If you have a moderate amount, it means pretty bad marriages can break up but people don’t treat it lightly.

When you put it that way, moderate sounds best. Even as we shouldn’t assume families are always falling apart more than they used to, we should consider the pros and cons of divorce, rather than insisting less is always better.

You can read the whole thing here. In addition to a picture of Donald and Ivana Trump, the piece features my figure:

Vasectomy reversal, divorce, and American optimism

That would be a good title for a longer essay (feel free to use it).

“Studies suggest that up to 6% of such men will request vasectomy reversal,” wrote the authors of a chapter in Clinical Care Pathways in Andrology. “Divorce with remarriage is by far the most common reason for vasectomy reversal.”

So, when in the divorce process do people start Googling “vasectomy reversal”? Is it men with younger girlfriends, considering leaving their wives? Women considering marrying a divorced man? Divorced couples considering another round of kids?

I don’t know, but Google does, or they could if they looked into it. I’ve only gotten as far as the strong relationship between searches for “vasectomy reversal” and state divorce rates:

I like to think of it as the optimism rooted in the American spirit. We always look forward to the next renewal, the next reboot, rebranding, or escape. Not because I really think it’s true, I just like to think of it that way.

The Google data is from their Trends tool, the divorce data is from the ACS via IPUMS.org.)

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(This is a return to an old post, in which I first noticed this relationship, with new data. Now I think divorce per population makes more sense for Google correlations, rather than divorce per married population, which I used before.)

The liberalization of divorce attitudes proceeds apace

The 2016 Gallup poll results on what is morally acceptable versus morally wrong came out over the summer, and they show that U.S. attitudes toward divorce continue to grow more positive. The acceptable attitude has gained 5 points in the last 5 years:

This parallels results from the General Social Survey, which asks, “Should divorce in this country be easier or more difficult to obtain than it is now?” The latest GSS is still 2014, but it also shows a marked increase in the liberal easier view over the same time period:

See more under the divorce tag.

Life table says divorce rate is 52.7%

After the eternal bliss, there are two ways out of marriage: divorce or death.

I have posted my code and calculations for divorce rates using the 2010-2012 American Community Survey as an Open Science Framework project. The files there should be enough to get you started if you want to make multiple-decrement life tables for divorce or other things.

Because the American Community survey records year of marriage, and divorce and widowhood, it’s perfectly set up for a multiple-decrement life table approach. A multiple-decrement life table uses the rate of each of two exits for each year of the original state (in this case marriage), to project the probability of either exit happening at or after a given year of marriage. It’s a projection of current rates, not a prediction of what will happen. So, if you write a headline that says, “your chance of divorce if you marry today is 52.7%,” that would be too strong, because it doesn’t take into account that the world might change. Also, people are different.

The divorce rate of 52.7% can accurately be described like this: “If current divorce and widowhood rates remain unchanged, 52.7% of today’s marriages would end in divorce before widowhood.” Here is a figure showing the probability of divorce at or after each year of the model:

So there’s 52.7% up at year 0. Marriages that make it to year 15 have a 30% chance of eventually divorcing, and so on.

Because the ACS doesn’t record anything about the spouses of divorce or widowed people, I don’t know who was married to whom, such as age, education, race-ethnicity, or even the sex of the spouse. So the estimates differ by sex as well as other characteristics. I estimated a bunch of them in the spreadsheet file on the OSF site, but here are the bottom lines, showing, for example, that second or higher-order marriages have a 58.5% projected divorce rate and Blacks have a 64.2% divorce rate, compared with 52.9% for Whites.

(The education ones should be taken with a grain of salt because education levels can change but this assumes they’re static.)

Check the divorce tag for other posts and papers on divorce.

The ASA-style citation to the OSF project would be like this:  Cohen, Philip N. 2016. “Multiple-Decrement Life Table Estimates of Divorce Rates.” Retrieved (osf.io/zber3).

Has your marriage lasted 50 years? Congratulations, you’re old

Just kidding: Congratulations, you’re old and have had a long marriage.

The Washington Post magazine has a feature out today called “The secret to a long-lasting marriage.” I don’t have a general comment on it, because I only made it to the third paragraph, and it’s probably worth reading.

But the third paragraph is funny:

They have beaten the odds of death and divorce: Of all current U.S. marriages, only 7 percent have reached the 50-year mark, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

It is certainly true that making it to the 50-year mark of marriage means you have beaten the odds of death and divorce. But that 7% figure has nothing to do with it, because it includes people who got married yesterday!

Here is the breakdown of when people got married, among people married right now (in the 2014 American Community Survey, which has to be the source for that statistic):

So the statistic is correct: only 7% of currently married people have been married for 50 years or more. Good for them! To bad for all those other people they were born so recently.

It’s all in the denominator. Sure, 50-year marrieds are rare, but compared to what?

With the ACS we can answer a more relevant question, which is this: among living people whose most recent marriage was 50 years ago or more, what is their current marital status? This is a little more encouraging: half are still married.

So let’s restate the original congratulatory message like this:

They have beaten the odds of death and divorce: Of all people who tied the knot 50 or more years ago, and who haven’t yet died, only 50% percent have made it this far without divorcing or becoming widowed, according to the American Community Survey.

Many happy returns.