re: Calculate the Odds You'll Get Divorced

dev — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:52:29 GMT

nice

re: Calculate the Odds You'll Get Divorced

Cotter Cunningham — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:25:04 GMT

Kelly & Laura-

Kelly - thanks for the link to the marriage calculator. We hope it is something people find useful. As to Laura's question - why we do ask women if they have children and not men?, we asked our calculator expert, Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Here is her answer:

"The divorce rates are based on the actual experiences of individuals, rather than the experiences of both people within a single marriage. Because the divorce rates are based on the characteristics of an individual, divorce rates can differ between men and women. People often do not marry people with the same characteristics as themselves. For example, college educated women have very different marital experiences from college educated men. College-educated women are least likely to ever marry among women and college-educated men are the most likely to marry among men. Not surprisingly, they may also have different divorce outcomes as a result of their different marital behaviors.

Unfortunately, fertility history never gathered for men by any government dataset of which I am aware. Since the data is based on peoples experiences over their lives and not simply children currently in the household, it is impossible to know whether men had children. As such, we simply do not use this field for men."

Hope this helps!

Cotter

re: Calculate the Odds You'll Get Divorced

Laura — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:18:55 GMT

I calculated the odds for both myself and my husband. We had the same odds (6%, which I found interesting bc we have a 10 year age gap), but I wonder why it is only relevant if the female has children? When I filled in the first question as male, for my hubby, the child question disappeared.