{"id":42163,"date":"2021-10-23T13:13:07","date_gmt":"2021-10-23T18:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=42163"},"modified":"2025-05-26T06:45:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T12:45:23","slug":"from-the-mouth-of-two-or-three-surveys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2021\/10\/from-the-mouth-of-two-or-three-surveys\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Mouth of Two or Three Surveys"},"content":{"rendered":"

My post a few days ago<\/a>\u00a0looked at whether members of the Church in the US reported a lower likelihood of identifying as \u201cdivorced\u201d than non-members in Pew data.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, afterwards some friends raised valid concerns about the fact that remarried divorcees would have identified as \u201cremarried.\u201d Therefore, if Latter-day Saints were remarried at a higher rate or were quicker to remarry after a divorce, both very plausible given our emphasis on marriage, that could explain the difference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I since discovered that the General Social Survey<\/a>, a large survey taken almost every year, has a question that asks married or widowed people whether they were ever divorced or separated. Combined with the marital status question, we can use this to create a measure of \u201cever been divorced.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, the General Social Survey only has a handful of self-identified members per survey, so you have to combine a lot of years to get a large enough sample of members to say anything interesting, so here I combined all survey years from 2004-2018 (the latest year available); this gives us 220 randomly surveyed members.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of those who have ever been married in the survey, 28% of members have been divorced at some point, while 42% of non-members have been divorced. This difference is highly significant, with a less than one in a thousand chance that it happened by chance. Taking into account age and\/or year of the survey does not change things.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, this is not saying what the probability that a marriage will end in divorce is. As I noted in my last post, this is technically very difficult. This is saying, when you take a random sample of ever-marrieds in the US, how many report having ever been divorced.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, we now have two completely different surveys with different methodologies that support the notion that in the United States members of the Church get divorced less than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts. Investigating why this is would take me down rabbit holes that I don’t have time to explore right now, but in my opinion it\u2019s now clear that self-identified Latter-day Saints do get divorced less.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Code is available on my Github page<\/a> for any wonks who want to play around with different variables and combinations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My post a few days ago\u00a0looked at whether members of the Church in the US reported a lower likelihood of identifying as \u201cdivorced\u201d than non-members in Pew data.\u00a0 However, afterwards some friends raised valid concerns about the fact that remarried divorcees would have identified as \u201cremarried.\u201d Therefore, if Latter-day Saints were remarried at a higher rate or were quicker to remarry after a divorce, both very plausible given our emphasis on marriage, that could explain the difference.\u00a0 I since discovered that the General Social Survey, a large survey taken almost every year, has a question that asks married or widowed people whether they were ever divorced or separated. Combined with the marital status question, we can use this to create a measure of \u201cever been divorced.\u201d\u00a0 Now, the General Social Survey only has a handful of self-identified members per survey, so you have to combine a lot of years to get a large enough sample of members to say anything interesting, so here I combined all survey years from 2004-2018 (the latest year available); this gives us 220 randomly surveyed members.\u00a0 Of those who have ever been married in the survey, 28% of members have been divorced at some point, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42163"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50076,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42163\/revisions\/50076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}