The Rise in the Divorce Rate

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The topic that I have chosen to do my research on is the rise in the divorce rate. The reason I have chosen this topic is because I myself have recently been through a divorce. I think everyone by now has heard that fifty-percent of marriages now a days end in divorce. So after going through a divorce myself I would like to know why that is.” Today 59% of the population is married down from 62% in 1990 and 72% in 1970. One of the first things I looked at was the average length of a marriage. I found that that average length of first marriages that end in divorce for males is 7.8 years and 7.9 for females. I found that interesting since my marriage lasted a little over seven years. A few other interesting statistics that I found where that there are 5.5 million unmarried couples living together and 10% percent of the population is divorced up from 8% in 1990 and 6% in 1980”. (http://forums.almaghrib.org/archive/index.php/t-23761.html)

The next thing I looked for was what might be a major cause for the divorce rate to rise and I found an article online from the Journal of “Marriage and the family” from May of 1995. That read:” Using a quasi-experimental pre-post intervention design and archival data from the National Center for Health Statistics, a team of researchers at the University of Oklahoma examined the effect adoption of no-fault divorce law had on the divorce rate across the 50 states. Education and income data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census and religiosity data from the Glenmary Research Center were used to assess the role of education, median family income and religiosity under the no-fault divorce regime. The researchers found that no-fault divorce laws had a significant positive effect on the divorce rate across th...

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...and the percentage of women who initiate divorces is much lower. Also, the higher rate of women initiators is probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be "badly behaved." Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity”. (Popenoe)

Works Cited

Author: David Popenoe

http://health.howstuffworks.com/relationships/marriage/debunking-divorce-myths10.htm

http://www.scfamilylaw.com/2007/06/articles/divorce/top-divorce-myths-and-facts/

http://forums.almaghrib.org/archive/index.php/t-23761.html

Paul A. Nakonezny, Robert D. Shull, Joseph Lee Rodgers. "The Effect of

No-Fault Divorce Law on the Divorce Rate across the 50 States and Its

Relation to Income, Education, and Religiosity." _Journal of Marriage

and the Family_ (May 1995): 477-488.

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Abstract posted to newsgroup by Mark Thomas

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