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What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

randalolson.com

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Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#21
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Married men are more productive (Or at least earn more): http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark.... * married men live longer : http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Healt...

Correction: married men must earn more & non-divorced men live longer :-)

Sorry, which study did you cite for this correction? Or are you just proposing a potential confounding variable?

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#22
I like statistics, but I think here we have personal and cultural factors that make statistics of no sense if you are trying to use probabilities for your personal life.

What I think is a key factor in an stable marriage is the ability to communicate, share and enjoy with your partner. I have been more than 20 years married and my wife wonders why our marriage is so much alive, I don't know the secret but we try to enjoy together and share ours life. The key factor is real communication.

Edited: Grammar.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#23
If you enjoy this type of thing might I recommend OKCupid's blog "OkTrends." I am married but yet I continue to read OkCupid's blog, just too fascinating:

http://blog.okcupid.com/

Today they have something on race, but if you look at their historical stuff they've looked at tons of other areas, most of which is pretty interesting.

As an example of a good one:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woma...

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#24
post #17

"On the bright side, the longer your marriage lasts, the less likely you are to divorce." Emmm.. Not too surprising, is it? Divorces kind of tend to terminate marriages early.

A dark re-twist to the technological adoption of "infant mortality rate".

I should stop thinking of such connections.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#25
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even, say, the difference between "never attend church" and "sometimes attend church" (which evidently makes divorce 10% more likely)? Or how about the difference between household incomes of $85k and $110k (bars differ by 3% out of about 40%)? But I'm glad to know that these are all results with low p-values, anyway: that adds some real confidence to these results. (Though I ought to ask: how many of these significa…

Check out the paper (Table 3) for significance statements: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 Some of the trends in Part 1 are not statistically significant (e.g., "never attend church" vs. "sometimes attend church"), but I presented them regardless because they have a pretty clear trend. I believe p-values are only presented in comparison to the reference point.

Oh, man, I knew I was cruising for a "it's right there in the paper" response. Well-deserved, I'll admit it: I'm being lazy. But then, that's why I like error bars on my graphs.

Thanks for the nicely presented data, regardless!

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#26

"It’s particularly interesting to note that the education difference matters more for women than men: Women are 50% more likely to end up divorced when there is an education difference versus men at only 32% more likely." For heterosexual marriages, wouldn't the percentages be the same? If a given number of divorces will always produce a equal number of male and female divorcees. Or is the author saying that the dire…

Divorced individuals of either gender may married people who have never been previously married.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#27

It's a shame the "being the same age" item didn't separate the data for men being older from the data for women being older (for heterosexual marriages). With society being somewhat more accepting of older men marrying younger women rather than the other way around, it would be interesting to see if marriage success agreed with that or not.

I noticed that.

Anecdotally a lot of older people in successful marriages (10+ years) have the stereotypical "man older than women" configuration (with 3 years older seeming to be common).

I'd be interested to see if a marriage is stronger or weaker when the man Vs. women was 1-5 years older. Or if the gender of the older person is irrelevant.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#28

"It’s particularly interesting to note that the education difference matters more for women than men: Women are 50% more likely to end up divorced when there is an education difference versus men at only 32% more likely." For heterosexual marriages, wouldn't the percentages be the same? If a given number of divorces will always produce a equal number of male and female divorcees. Or is the author saying that the dire…

The author addresses this in the comments. He states that there are likely more divorces for one gender than the other in his data set. Which implies to me that individuals, rather than couples, are surveyed about their marriages/divorces. So if he surveyed 10 women and 10 men, those 10 women weren't married to those 10 men. If that isn't the case, then I'm also not sure how that could be the case given that he state…

Perhaps (at least in this data), the women were more likely to have been married multiple times?

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#29

"It’s particularly interesting to note that the education difference matters more for women than men: Women are 50% more likely to end up divorced when there is an education difference versus men at only 32% more likely." For heterosexual marriages, wouldn't the percentages be the same? If a given number of divorces will always produce a equal number of male and female divorcees. Or is the author saying that the dire…

The author addresses this in the comments. He states that there are likely more divorces for one gender than the other in his data set. Which implies to me that individuals, rather than couples, are surveyed about their marriages/divorces. So if he surveyed 10 women and 10 men, those 10 women weren't married to those 10 men. If that isn't the case, then I'm also not sure how that could be the case given that he state…

I believe this is it. From the source paper:

"We excluded respondents who had a non-US IP address, reported having a same-sex marriage, reported an age at marriage of less than 13 years old, or were above age 60."

The paper used mTurk to get ~3000 responses to their survey. So it's basically saying "the men who answered these questions ended up having this score, the women who answered these questions ended up having a slightly different score"

EDIT: Link to paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#30

"It’s particularly interesting to note that the education difference matters more for women than men: Women are 50% more likely to end up divorced when there is an education difference versus men at only 32% more likely." For heterosexual marriages, wouldn't the percentages be the same? If a given number of divorces will always produce a equal number of male and female divorcees. Or is the author saying that the dire…

The author addresses this in the comments. He states that there are likely more divorces for one gender than the other in his data set. Which implies to me that individuals, rather than couples, are surveyed about their marriages/divorces. So if he surveyed 10 women and 10 men, those 10 women weren't married to those 10 men. If that isn't the case, then I'm also not sure how that could be the case given that he state…

Thank you, that makes sense. I assumed that he was surveying relationships rather than individuals (ie divorces rather than divorcees), which was a poor assumption on my part.

Nevertheless, it would have useful if the nature of the data was better described in the article itself. I run a comment blocker in Chrome so I didn't see the comments until you mentioned them.

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