Suzi wrote a post about a marriage duration probability calculator. Our odds of making it this far came out to just under 37%. I would be interested in knowing where the formula came from.
Beating the odds
February 14, 2007 By
my personal space
Ron Rennick
We had a 50% chance of still being married at out 15th anniversary. That was last year
It drops to 41% for 20 years – which seems very odd. I would think the frequency of divorce drops off fairly rapidly as the marriage ages.
We have a 71% probability of being married at 15 years, which will be in June.
I haven’t looked at the Canadian statistics but in the UK, the longer you stay married, the more likely you are to stay married. the vast majority of divorces are in the early years.
Religiosity is also positively corelated with both being married and staying married, for reasons that are probably obvious. Actually that is one of the things that makes all those comparisons between those who cohabit before marriage and those who don’t total bullshit. The fact is those who don’t cohabit before marriage are WAY more religious than those who do and it is impossible to get a comparable sample.
Based on one of the articles linked in Suzi’s post the calculator was built based on US census statistics.
But I don’t think that’s a very good predictive measure because it isn’t really about your, but rather about all the people who you share the attributes with.
So it is really saying that only 37% of people who have the same attributes as you will make it as far as you have. Which seems to make a lot more sense.
The odd thing is that, statistically, religion is a negative when considering the likelihood of divorce. The rates are actually higher for church-going, born again Christians than for atheists and agnostics.
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/baptist_divorce.html
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
The math came from Garth Sundem’s blog. He wrote Geek Logik.
The rate for Christians who have experienced a divorce is 35%. The rate for atheists and agnostics who have experienced a divorce is 35%. Those rates are according to Barna.
Note that Religious Tolerance says that non-denominational groups have a 34% rate, but that Catholics and Lutherans have a 21%. Atheists and agnostics have the SAME rate as the non-denominational Christians.
Also, atheists and agnostics get married less often than Christians, so they aren’t going to get divorced. They’ll just move out.
Finally, (you were waiting for that, weren’t you?) the statistics are for all marriages and don’t apply to an individual’s likelihood of marrying and it is not just about divorce. As the Political Calculations’ guy who commented on my blog said, death counts too.
Chris/JoVE – I think at one point there was a statistic that if your marriage lasted 10 years, there was a 75 or 80% chance it would last for life.
Christine – it could be a rough 3 months
Ron – understood from the get go. Statistics often trigger a reminder of the principle found in Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy that statistics cannot be applied to an individual human being. This is kinda my way of illustrating it.
Patti – If I can say it without implying that I’m diagreeing with you, I agree with CS Lewis that both atheism and agnostism are religions.
Suzi – thanks for the research. Like Garth, I’m a numbers guy.
Honey, you should totally do more statistics posts.
Lookee all the comments!
Ron – You can disagree with me…we’re grown-ups, and we can handle it!
Atheism and agnosticism are life philosophies at the very least, and may fall into some definitions of religion.
Suzi – You’re right, I misstated it. But the odd thing is that being religious doesn’t seem to make much difference in the divorce rate, except for Catholics. Some were divorced before they became Christians, but I’ve seen many of my friends at church divorce. Tragedy happens to all.