How We Know the Divorce Rate Is Falling (original) (raw)

The Upshot|How We Know the Divorce Rate Is Falling

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-divorce-rate-is-falling.html

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Happily Ever After

Dec. 3, 2014

The divorce rate has been falling for more than three decades. That fact is not news, but it still surprises a lot of people. And so when Claire Cain Miller wrote about the trend for The Upshot this week, several readers asked for more detail, with some citing a Huffington Post article questioning the official Census Bureau data on the trends. As one of the researchers who has studied the issue, I thought it worth digging deeper into the data.

In one sense, divorce is easy to measure, because it leaves a paper trail, in the form of divorce certificates on file at county courthouses. At the end of each year, most states ask each county how many new divorce certificates they’ve issued, and the states report the total number to the federal government. The federal government then calculates a divorce rate, measured as the number of divorces per thousand people.

By this measure, the divorce rate peaked at 5.3 divorces per thousand people in 1981, before falling to 4.7 in 1990, and it has since fallen further to 3.6 in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available. Of course, the marriage rate has also fallen over this period. But even measuring divorces relative to the population that could plausibly get divorced — the number of people who are married — shows that divorce peaked in 1979, and has fallen by about 24 percent since.

Because these data theoretically count all divorces, many researchers regard them as the gold standard for evaluating divorce trends. However, Sheela Kennedy and Steven Ruggles, two researchers at the University of Minnesota, have recently argued that this reliance may be unwarranted. They note that federal funding for states to collect detailed divorce data was cut in 1996, and they suspect that in the time since, some states may have become less vigorous in chasing down divorce numbers from every county courthouse. If the government has grown more lax in counting divorce certificates, the measured divorce rate might fall even if actual divorce rates were rising.

It’s a plausible conjecture, but the bulk of evidence suggests it is not the case. The decline in measured divorce rates is not confined to just a few states. Rather, divorce has fallen since 1990 in every one of the 44 states that report such data. Given that these data come from 44 independent statistical agencies, it seems unlikely that all of them have seen their statistical systems deteriorate in sync. Indeed, the decline in divorce is also evident in those states that have high-quality systems for collecting divorce data. Likewise, the divorce rate within New York State has trended downward over the past 15 years in 56 of its 62 counties, suggesting that the aggregate decline isn’t being driven by underreporting from any specific county courthouse.

It’s even possible that reporting has improved in some states as they have adopted electronic records systems. In those states, the official statistics actually understate the recent decline in divorce, because the data for earlier years underestimated the extent of divorce then. It’s far less likely that the decline in divorce rates reflects a statistical anomaly than that it reflects a fundamental shift in American family life.

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