Time to “Go ahead and shack up”?

[Re-post of my article available at Institute for Family Studies.]

 

            Cohabitation is trending big in the news once again. Did you hear? Let’s talk about the news and what it means. Here are just a few of the headlines based on a study, just out.

            Go ahead and shack up

            Call Your Dad: Living Together Before Marriage Does Not Lead to Divorce

            Cohabitation Doesn't Cause Divorce, After All

            Living Together Does Not Affect Divorce Rates

            Debunked: Cohabitating couples not more likely to divorce

            My personal favorite is the first one, but the most curious headline, to me, is the second. I’d think you should want to tell both father and your mother the good news. And what parent does not love to hear about the latest in social science findings from their children?

            I have a multiple-choice question for you.    

Which message below do you think is the closest to what the average person took away from these headlines and stories?

            A. There is no risk to living with someone before you marry.

           

            B. There is no added risk for divorce in a marriage if you lived with your future mate before marrying.

           

            C. People who only ever cohabited with the person they marry, after having mutually clarified plans for marriage, are at no greater risk for divorce or lower marital happiness than those who wait until marriage to live together. 

            Got your answer? If you are paying close attention to the headlines, you may have picked answer B. I will give you half credit if you did; but only half credit because I think answer A is the best answer to the question I asked. However, those who have been reading the media stories carefully may well have gotten the message in answer B. If you know a lot of research on cohabitation, you might have picked answer C. But that was a trick answer. Sorry about that. Answer C is close to what I’d say is a correct answer if I’d asked you what the research shows about cohabiting prior to marriage—but that is not the question that I asked.

            I think most people absorbing some aspect of these stories (and all those like them) would have gotten the message that there are no risks to cohabiting. Can I prove that this is what the average person took away? Not really. It would be a fascinating research project to test what people concluded from the media buzz. But if I’m on a limb in this, it seems like a pretty safe one to me. Of the stories I link to above, I think the third one does give important and interesting nuances, particularly later in the piece. I do not think you have to agree with me about what the average person might have understood from these recent stories to consider other points I’ll make here about various risks associated with some patterns of cohabiting before marriage.

            The headlines above were sparked by a study just published in the Journal for Marriage and Family. The study’s author is Arielle Kuperberg of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her bio says one of her interests is “examining (and sometimes overturning) modern day myths about romantic relationships.” I would say that her purported findings are consistent with this professional interest.  

            Here are some quotes from that third story I linked to above:

New research finds that premarital cohabitation isn't linked with divorce at all.

            Arielle Kuperberg, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, finds that when accounting for the age of moving in together, there is no difference in divorce rates between cohabiters and those who moved in after marriage.

            "Cohabitation does not cause divorce — yay," Kuperberg told Live Science, adding the exclamation because about two-thirds of new marriages in the United States start with cohabitation.

           

            I like aspects of Kuperberg’s study. It is novel and clever. In analyzing the risk for divorce associated with cohabiting prior to marriage, Kuperberg focused on the age that people moved in together rather than the age at which people marry, finding that the former is more important than the latter in understanding divorce risk. When she controls for the age people were when they moved in with their partners, the association between cohabiting prior to marriage and divorce gets weaker than it otherwise seems to be. In some analyses, she adds enough control variables to reduce the association to zero, which is the basis of her asserting in the media that there is no risk for divorce based on cohabiting prior to marriage. If that sounds pretty technical, that’s because it is. That is as technical as I am going to get in this piece. (I plan to write another more technical comment on her study soon, where I will describe what I like and what I am concerned about in her statistical procedures.)

            At the heart of it, Kuperberg asserts that scores of researchers have had it wrong for decades, and that maybe there never has been an association between cohabiting before marriage and divorce. She asserts that what was misunderstood all these years is that cohabiters are more likely to divorce, not because they cohabited, but because they tended to start living together when they were too young to either be making a wise choice in a mate or to take on the roles of marriage. This logic is akin to the well-replicated, robust finding that marrying young is associated with greater odds of divorce. Given that, why wouldn’t moving in together at a young age also be a problem? Of course it would be. Both relationship transitions (cohabitation or marriage) result in increased constraints on your options in life; I and my colleague Galena Rhoades have been arguing for a while now that it’s important to be making careful decisions when one is about to go through a transition, like cohabitation, that restricts future options.[i]

            Before I go further, I should note that social scientists do not have any control over headlines and have little control over the content of stories on their work. You can tell in some media reports that what Kuperberg was suggesting from her study was nuanced, but that does not mean that the average consumer of such headlines and stories understood a nuanced story or how cohabitation could be associated with potential risks for her or him.

            So, what’s the problem if someone did assume from the media that there is no risk for cohabiting prior to marriage, in a pretty general, non-nuanced way? Consider the following research findings—findings based on many excellent studies:

                       

·       Serial cohabitation is associated with greater risk for divorce.[ii] In this context, serial cohabitation means living with more than one partner before marrying. Cohabiting with more than just the person you end up marrying is associated with poorer outcomes in marriage.[iii]

·       Cohabiting unions are decreasingly likely to end in marriage.[iv]

·       Cohabiting with your eventual mate before having clear, mutual plans for marriage is associated with lower marital satisfaction and higher risk for divorce.[v] Among those who are currently cohabiting, those with clear plans for marriage have stronger relationships.[vi]

·       Cohabiting before having a mutual and clear intention to marry is on the rise.[vii]

·       The rate of unplanned pregnancies is much greater among unmarried, cohabiting women than it is among married women.[viii]

·       The transition into living together is associated with sharply increasing constraints of the sort that make it harder to break-up, yet the kind of commitment (dedication) that is most strongly associated with happy, strong relationships levels off.[ix]

·       Having sex earlier in a relationship is associated with lower marital quality, partly because moving quickly to sex is associated with moving quickly to cohabiting. That is, for some couples, sex too soon leads to cohabiting too soon, which can lead to a poorer foundation for a marriage.[x]  (Not sure how that could be? See the prior bullet point and think about what it may be like to get stuck in a relationship that is not as good a fit for you as one you might have ended up in if you’d not made it harder to break up by cohabiting with your current partner.[xi])

            These are solid research findings but you should know that there are different possible explanations for them. Some aspects of risk associated with cohabitation are due to what social scientists call selection effects. Selection effects are factors that can explain why some people experience poor outcomes that appear to be associated with some behavior (for example, cohabiting) when the poor outcomes are really more associated with other characteristics in one’s life (for example, poverty). It is very clear that some of the higher risk patterns related to cohabitation are more common for people at serious economic disadvantage. For example, with poverty, one will have additional pressures to cohabit in situations where it may be extra risky. I refer you to the comments in the later part of the media story at the third link above; the research by Sharon Sassler is quite thoughtful on such issues.

            On the other hand, these findings I list above surely reflect some aspects of risk that are causal. That is, at times, a person can make a choice (like not to move in with a particular partner at a particular time) that improves their odds of eventually having a lasting, satisfying marriage—which may well be with someone other than the person they decided not to move in with. When wrestling with selection versus causality (not my topic today), it’s useful to think clearly about what a person has or does not have control over. If a person could behave differently, and choose one option over another that is on a less risky path, that behavior is causally related to the quality of life.

            Spoiler alert. I think (with important exceptions) that people can make choices that improve their odds in love and marriage if they understand what is risky and why. Kuperberg believes this also, as you shall see below, though her current work is mostly focused on the risk of partnering up at too young an age.

            Based on headlines and some stories in the media, many people may come to believe that there are no risks inherent in some patterns of cohabitation. But does that conclusion seem consistent with the findings I just listed?

            Imagine a woman, Susie, who is in her early 20s, who absorbed the message that cohabitation before marriage is not risky. Maybe she even shared this great news with her father and mother and friends. Good news is contagious, you know. She’s been in a relationship for a couple of months with a man named Jake. She likes Jake, but she isn’t quite sure if he’s right for her (as in, right for marriage and her future). Since she likes him and wants to see if this could go the distance—and she’s been reassured in her sense that cohabitation is not risky—she and Jake go ahead and move in together. Worst case, she thinks, she can use this time together to test the relationship. (By the way, that’s among the least good answers you can have for why you might live with someone.[xii])

            Now Susie and Jake are sharing a single address. They don’t take too much notice of the fact that they have now made it harder to break up even though they are far from having figured out if they have a future together. It’s just harder to break up when cohabiting compared to dating.

            Susie and Jake like each other. There is a lot of attraction and, now that they are under the same roof, there is a lot of sex. This is not exactly a suspenseful television show where you cannot see where the script-writer is headed. Susie and Jake have a child—a child they did not plan to have. As noted above, cohabiting couples are both less likely than in the past to eventually marry, and they are more likely than couples who have married to have a child that they did not plan on having. Susie and Jake liked each other enough to move in together, but they had not developed any kind of strong, mutual commitment to a life together, much less a commitment to raising a child together.

            After living together for two years, Susie and Jake break up. Since they were living together and have a child, the process of breaking up took a lot more time and a lot more pain than it would otherwise have taken. Of course, this is not a very unusual story. Lots of couples live together before marriage. Many of these couples move in together before there is any mutual commitment to a future, before there is any mutual commitment to raise a child together, and before even any clear discussion or decisions about what living together means.[xiii]  Now, in this context, and thinking about Susie and Jake, does it still sound like there are no risks associated with cohabiting prior to marriage?  

            This next point is pretty crucial, technically. As far as I can tell, Kuperberg’s study and conclusions do not directly address the type of situation I just described with Susie and Jake. Her analysis is focused on couples who married and whether or not those couples had cohabited prior to marrying. But Susie and Jake’s story is also a story about cohabitation. It is also a story about cohabitation before marriage. It’s just not a story about their marriage. And it is a story about higher risk.

            Imagine that Susie had avoided moving in with Jake, perhaps because she was a little more wary about the implications of moving in with someone she had only known for two months. In fact, imagine that they do not move in together but, instead, they continue dating each other—and then they break up three months later. And they do not have a child. What do you think? Are Susie and Jake better off for not having moved in together in the first place?

            Back to Kuperberg’s study and report. As I understand her analyses, here is one way to summarize her findings: For people who only ever live with the one person they end up marrying, and who do not have a child prior to cohabiting, and who wait to cohabit or marry until after the age 23, the risk for divorce related to cohabiting before marriage is very low. I don’t actually believe her study supports a conclusion that is this strong, but I think it’s close to what one would conclude if you accepted all the assumptions of her work. In fact, consistent with this, she gives some advice at the conclusion of her journal article:  

            This research also suggests that young couples wishing to avoid divorce would be better served by delaying settling down and forming coresidential unions until their mid-20s when they are older and more established in their lives, goals, and careers, whether married or not at the time of coresidence, rather than avoiding premarital cohabitation altogether.  (Kuperberg, 2014, p. 368)

            You may or may not agree with this advice, but this quote from her journal article is a lot more circumspect than some of the messages that just blew through our culture over the past couple of weeks. I come back to where I started. What message do you think people absorbed with all the recent stories on the good news about cohabitation? Personally, I’d prefer there to be more caution in the wind.

References

If you are interested in a narrative summary of our published research on cohabitation,  it's available here.

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[i] Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499–509.

[ii] Lichter, D., & Qian, Z. (2008). Serial cohabitation and the marital life course. Journal of Marriage & Family, 70, 861-878.; Lichter, D.T., Turner, R.N., Sassler, S. (2010). National estimates of the rise in serial cohabitation. Social Science Research, 39, 754-765.

[iii] Teachman, J. D. (2003). Premarital sex, premarital cohabitation, and the risk of subsequent marital dissolution among women. Journal of Marriage and Family, 65(2), 444-455.

[iv] Lichter, D.T., Turner, R.N., Sassler, S. (2010). National estimates of the rise in serial cohabitation. Social Science Research, 39, 754-765.; Vespa, J. (2014). Historical trends in the marital intentions of one-time and serial cohabitors.  Journal of Marriage and Family, 76, 207-217. 

[v] Kline, G. H., Stanley, S. M., Markman, H. J., Olmos-Gallo, P. A., St. Peters, M., Whitton, S. W., & Prado, L. (2004). Timing is everything: Pre-engagement cohabitation and increased risk for poor marital outcomes. Journal of Family Psychology, 18, 311-318.; Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2009). The pre-engagement cohabitation effect: A replication and extension of previous findings. Journal of Family Psychology, 23, 107-111.; Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., Amato, P. R., Markman, H. J., & Johnson, C. A. (2010). The timing of cohabitation and engagement: Impact on first and second marriages. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72, 906-918.; Manning, W. D., & Cohen, J. A. (2012). Premarital cohabitation and marital dissolution: An examination of recent marriages. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74, 377 – 387.

[vi] Brown, S. L. (2004). Moving from cohabitation to marriage: effects on relationship quality. Social Science Research, 33, 1-20.

[vii] Vespa, J. (2014). Historical trends in the marital intentions of one-time and serial cohabitors.  Journal of Marriage and Family, 76, 207-217. 

[viii] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-07-24/cdc-unintended-births/56444732/1; see also this document from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy: https://thenationalcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resource-primary-download/dcr_sectiona.pdf

[ix] Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2012). The impact of the transition to cohabitation on relationship functioning: Cross-sectional and longitudinal findings. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(3), 348 - 358.; for evidence that constraints make staying together more likely, regardless of dedication to be together, see Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2010).  Should I stay or should I go? Predicting dating relationship stability from four aspects of commitment. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(5), 543-550.

[x] Sassler, S., Addo, F. R., & Lichter, D. T. (2012).  The tempo of sexual activity and later relationship quality.  Journal of Marriage and Family, 74, 708 – 725.; see also Busby, D. M., Carroll, J. S., & Willoughby, B. J. (2010). Compatibility or Restraint? The Effects of Sexual Timing on Marriage Relationships. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(6), 766-774.

[xi] Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499–509.

[xii] Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2009). Couples' reasons for cohabitation: Associations with individual well-being and relationship quality. Journal of Family Issues, 30, 233 - 258.

[xiii] Manning, W. D., & Smock, P. J. (2005).  Measuring and modeling cohabitation: New perspectives from qualitative data.  Journal of Marriage and Family, 67, 989 - 1002.;  Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). Understanding romantic relationships among emerging adults: The significant roles of cohabitation and ambiguity. In F. D. Fincham & M. Cui (Eds.), Romantic relationships in emerging adulthood (pp. 234-251). New York: Cambridge University Press.

My Take on Kuperberg's Study and Media Suggesting No Risks from Cohabitation Before Marriage

As promised, I have written a substantial post (really, an article) on the resent study by Arielle Kuperberg on cohabitation prior to marriage. The media attention suggested that there is no risk for cohabiting prior to marriage. My article is posted at the blog for The Institute for Family Studies. You can access it here.

I will likely write a second piece on this study that has gotten so much attention, too. That piece will be more methodological while my first piece is heavily conceptual.

As a reminder, if you are interested in a narrative summary of our published research on cohabitation,  it's available here.

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Worth Reading: On Fatherhood and Challenges Where Things Have Come Apart

Whatever your politics or beliefs about policy strategies, this piece by Charles Blow is excellent for describing the pain involved for men and their children, and the immensity of the challenges that exist for those seeking to restore fatherhood in some of the most highly disadvantaged contexts.  Fathers’ Sons and Brothers’ Keepers by Charles Blow.

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A Brief Piece on How Government Policy Disincentives Punish Marriage for Low Income Couples

AEI's Pethokoukis put out this brief piece on how government policies discourage marriage among those who are economically disadvantaged: Here’s exactly how marriage penalties discourage marriage

The piece gives you a quick example of the type of policy that I referred to in my last post (below, related to Annie Lowrey's article) as having negative consequences for those low income couples who would like to be married. Hard to fathom how we have a government that cannot address such things and build more rational models of incentives.

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About Those Controversial “Marriage” Programs Funded by the Government

The fur is flying once again around questions of the wisdom and effectiveness of the government funded efforts to increase and strengthen two parent families through the use of relationship education strategies. I believe that things have heated up, in part, because this issue about relationship education has now intersected with this year’s political debate about the nature of poverty and income inequality. That is too bad because politically-infused rhetoric is not conducive to the type of smart policy discussions that need to be sustained to actually make a difference in the lives of real people.

In this post, I am going to link to four articles that exemplify the issues being debated right now. My goal here is to focus in on a few specific points raised in the four articles, particularly related to the subject of government funded initiatives providing relationship education. Links are provided if you want to find and read the pieces I reference.

First up, Kay Hymowitz wrote a broad, thoughtful piece entitled How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids (New York Times on February 8^th, 2014). She covers a lot of important ground. I like how she challenges some of the deeply held viewpoints of liberals and conservatives. I also like how she embraces the bi-directionality of how poverty impacts families and how romantic and sexual relationships impact poverty. I think, for some people, the latter point may get uncomfortably close to how marriage might play some causal role in poverty. For example, romantic and sexual relationships impact childbearing and also the odds of succeeding in marriage, which, in turn, all influence poverty. I believe that discussions about poverty and family policy/programs that do not embrace the obvious and complex ways that causation flows both ways are unproductive; it is better to embrace than ignore complexity when it is relevant.

Next up is a piece by Annie Lowrey, in the New York Times Magazine: Can Marriage Cure Poverty? (February 4^th, 2014). Lowrey’s piece is excellent though I think it is slightly marred by the way she caricatures conservatives. But she gets some crucial points right. First, non-marriage is linked with poverty in some profound ways, and the only real debate on that subject is not if but how. Second, she acknowledges that there is some positive news in the recent, large-scale government funded evaluations testing relationship education strategies with unmarried couples in poverty. Third, she directly addresses the topic of the unbelievably dumb disincentives within government policies that punish disadvantaged couples as they try to get ahead. That’s a topic for another day, but the disincentives are probably growing and that makes me fear for our future.

On the other hand, Lowrey tilts pretty far to the unidirectional viewpoint that poverty drives problems in family structure and marriage without addressing the ways romantic partnering and sexual relationships contribute to disadvantage and risk. Hymowitz, as I noted above, digs in on this important issue while also addressing aspects of the complexity of marriage for some among the disadvantaged.

I raise these particular issues here because I want draw attention to one type of relationship education that has been utilized in some of the government supported efforts that gets little or no attention in the typical discussions. There have been a lot of services focused on helping individuals, not couples, make relationship choices that are designed to foster their odds of achieving their own life goals (including, eventually, marriage if desired) while also improving the lives of their children. Such individually-oriented relationship education is founded on the awareness that the economic, mental, and physical wellbeing of adults is deeply impacted by what happens in their love lives. Anyone close to the challenges confronting those with immense disadvantages recognizes that landing with a wrong, poorly matched, or dangerous partner can completely upend any other progress in life. Does any of this type of work get acknowledged in public discourse about government funded relationship education? Rarely. On the ground, I see liberals and conservatives united around the obvious rationality of such strategies. We do need robust evaluations of such services (they are pretty new and innovative), but the goals are important and some of the work is immensely thoughtful. 

Instead of showing any awareness of some of the innovative work being attempted, what is often suggested or implied in media stories is that government funded relationship education efforts are focused primarily on getting people in poverty to get partnered-up in marriage because that will magically cure all the ills of poverty, family functioning, and individual wellbeing. Right. Of course it will. And, of course, that’s how most of the people working on the ground in such efforts think. Magic beans, Jack.

If your sarcasm meter is not functioning, let me clarify: I’ve been around this work for a long time. I do not know anyone deeply involved who thinks so simplistically about this work. In fact, on the broader subject of thoughtfulness, I have been fortunate to be in scores of meetings with diverse scholars and experts grappling with complex issues about helping people—meetings where what happens is a lot more substantive than implied, for example, by a critic in one of the upcoming pieces I link to below who refers to “mucking around in people's lives.”

Related to complexity and thoughtfulness, I also want to suggest that anyone who wants to be taken seriously in discussing relationship education and government policies needs to think carefully about the types of outcomes that would be positive in different situations. For example, there are many cases wherein a good outcome of relationship education amounts to a damaging or destructive relationship coming to an end—not ending in marriage. Marriage is a public and private good, desired by many, but that does not mean any marriage to anybody. Strategists and workers on the ground level seem to have wholly accepted the goal of fostering healthy relationships and marriage; this fact seems to elude most critics of the efforts. This point also highlights just one of the reasons why it may be quite challenging to interpret simple statistics about marriage and divorce rates at the macro level as part of these discussions. 

Moving on to the other two articles. Both deal evidence of effectiveness of services provided to couples in some of the most intensive type of government efforts, with a particular focus on two large, federally funded, multi-site studies of program impacts for comprehensive services provided to disadvantaged couples who are either unmarried and having a child (The Building Strong Families Study: BSF) or married with children (The Supporting Healthy Marriage Study: SHM).

One lengthy piece was written by Thomas Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Great Mom & Dad Experiment (January 20^th, 2014). There are some elements of Bartlett’s piece that I take issue with, but, for this type of policy discussion, the piece seems to me to be relatively fair. He does a good job describing a range of complex issue and areas of serious disagreement among some of those who have thought about these issues. Another piece also covers a good deal of ground. It’s by Emily Alpert Reyes of McClatchy News: Federal Programs to Improve Marriage Don't Work (February 10, 2014). As with others here, there are complex issues raised in this piece that I may come back to in a later piece, but I mention both of these pieces here because I want to wrap up this post by making three points related to those two large government studies noted above. Many commentators of these two studies discuss the results as if there were no impacts at all. Sometimes, modest impacts are acknowledged but with an assumption that, surely, the government would not and should not continue to fund programs in any area where there were similarly modest findings in large, randomized trials.

In making these points, I take nothing from the fact that the actual findings and implications are complex.

1.  The one site among eight in the BSF study (Family Expectations in Oklahoma City) that successfully delivered a serious “dose” of the services to the participating couples demonstrated a range of statistically significant, positive impacts at the 15 month follow-up. Further, there was a statistically significant impact on family stability (a 20% increase) at the 3 year point follow-up. It is true that there was an absence of evidence for other types of significant impacts. However, obtaining a relatively large impact on a core, long-term outcome of policy significance (family stability) seems pretty important. Such an outcome is rare in this type of study.

2. Those conducting the large, SHM study, learned a great deal from the BSF study. As a result, all eight sites in that study delivered a substantial dose of the services to most couples in the program groups. What did they find? The results from the 12 month follow-up showed statistically significant, though small, impacts on a number of variables related to marital quality. (There are findings coming out soon on the 3 year follow-up.)   

3. Most large-scale studies of most government programs find no impacts. In 1987, a sociologist deeply acquainted with government evaluations, Peter Rossi, came up with The Iron Law of Evaluation, which he stated thusly: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.” Translation? In most such studies, one can expect no significant impacts; yet there were interpretable, significant impacts in the two studies noted above of these early efforts.  

I could list a wide variety of government programs and services that have poor evidence of effectiveness but that, nevertheless, receive vastly greater funding than the nascent attempts to help individuals and couples in their relationships. There are also many smaller studies, including some with very strong methodology, that show consistent evidence of positive impacts from relationship education. (Not my topic today.)

Am I pleased with modest impacts of those two large studies? No. As someone who works in this field, I see the current studies as promising, but like many others, I want to see us learn from current efforts and strengthen impacts.

In all of this, I have been puzzled by calls to defund what seem to me to be, by historical standards, promising findings coming early in a relatively new arena for government involvement. Why don’t the same critics explicitly call for defunding services and programs that receive hundreds of times the funding, services that happen to have long trails of meager or non-significant findings? I cannot read the minds of others, but I think some of the answer comes back to where I started. I think some of the energy currently rushing into this space, but certainly not all, is really about other issues.   

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Disclosure:  I think that just about everyone (but not everyone) writing and commenting on these matters has some type of bias or values animating their arguments, and it is worth considering what those may be when thinking through the points being bandied about. I try to be very above board, so here is my disclosure. You should know that Howard Markman and I (and a host of colleagues) have developed a variety of relationship education approaches that were used in some of the sites in the BSF and SHM studies and that are also used in a number of the projects funded by the government around the U.S. I receive income from our company called PREP. Further, I have been a long-time adviser for the efforts in Oklahoma. Of greater weight within me is the fact that I do believe in trying to build on promising studies, practices, and program models in these areas I focus on here. You are entitled, of course, to disregard any of my viewpoints based on these facts, but I hope those with serious interest would grapple with the ideas and consider where there may be inherent merit.

Reference for Rossi:  Rossi, P. H. (1987). The Iron Law of Evaluation and other metallic rules. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 4, 3-20.  (for an interesting piece on this, click here) 

Couples, Commitment, and Community Involvement

There is a new post by me at the blog for The Institute for Family Studies on couples and community involvement and how that reflects and influences commitment.  You can read it here.  

Conservative Faith Groups and High Divorce Rates

The Council for Contemporary Families (CCF) got some headlines recently for releasing findings of a study showing, among various things, that conservative Protestants are most likely of all to be divorced among various religious groups. Additionally, they noted that evangelical Protestants are more likely to be divorced than non-religious persons. This type of finding surfaces every couple of years and gets a lot of media attention because it is counter intuitive. After all, don’t conservative Protestants tout marital and family stability as a strong value? (The answer is: Yes they do.)

You can read the summary of the findings CCF released here (search for the term “divorce” once you get to that page). I have a few thoughts on the release by CCF. Before proceeding, I need to make it clear that I have only read what is on CCF’s website. The information there is based on a symposium they hosted for the 50^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What they have posted there is all I’ve read. That is important because there could be some greater depth and nuance in recent analyses that I have not yet read and will not be addressing here in this post.  

My main reaction to the facts they have posted is that there is not so much a new finding here as there is a lot of attention to type of finding that has often been obtained in social science. Conservative religious groups have long had higher divorce rates than other less religious or non-religious groups. I first read of such findings at least 20 or 30 years ago. For a long time, the two primary explanations for such a counter-intuitive finding are that the conservatively religious tend to be lower in socioeconomic status and that they also tend to marry at younger ages. The report by CCF acknowledges both points. Further, they put the most emphasis on early age at marriage. They also summarize research by Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak in this way:  “However, new research by Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak suggests that evangelical Protestants’ cultural encouragement of early marriage and discouragement of birth control and higher education attainment explain the higher divorce rate in counties with a larger proportion of evangelical Protestants.”

I am going to focus in on the early age at marriage part. Marrying young has long been among the greatest—if not the single greatest—risk factor for divorce.  Yes, we all know many couples who married 18 and who have wonderful marriages. But there are scores of other couples who married young whom you may have never even met as a couple, who nevertheless went on to divorce.

This association between divorce and early marriage is so strong that many experts believe that the rising age of marriage is among the chief reasons that the divorce rate has come down and leveled off. There is an entire report about this and related issues published by the National Marriage Project, called Knot Yet. The report deals with both delayed marriage and also the implications child bearing not being similarly delayed. The report is excellent and, if you want to go deeper on these this particular theme, I suggest you read it.

The finding emphasized by CCF is the real deal. It is so real in fact, that it’s worth of serious thought and discussion among conservative religious groups (including some evangelical protestant groups). What should you encourage young people to do in light of various beliefs and values you hold dear? As a side point, I would suggest that there is a pretty huge range of evangelicalism in the US, and many such groups do not marry young. So, before scratching your head too much on this, it’s worth being focused on which group in particular you want to think about.

Let’s talk about the practice of faith. CCF is implicating conservative faith culture in higher divorce because of greater cultural expectation and pressure to marry young. This does not mean that faith itself—as in the content of one’s faith and all aspects of the practice of one’s faith—is causing divorce. Far from it. It does mean that the cultural practice of some conservative groups, specifically related to pressure to marry young, is implicated in risk of divorce.

I can best clarify the distinction I’m trying to make above by pointing to another finding that CCF touted. In fact, the CCF release mentions two facts that seem to me to be mildly contradictory. First, they noted that “. . . the common conservative argument that strong religion leads to strong families does not hold up.” If you focus on the risk for divorce based in marrying very young, where marrying young is partly driven by conservative beliefs about sex and marriage, they have a reasonable point. That is, “strong religion” (their term, which they suggest is typified by evangelical Protestantism) is, indeed, associated with more divorce. In fact, I’ve never seen any data to the contrary, just differences in how large this effect might be in different studies and samples.

Second, the CCF release noted another finding from the recent research: “Overall, couples who have higher levels of religious service attendance, especially if the couple attends together, have lower rates of divorce.”

Is that “strong religious” too? It seems religious. It seems strong. It also fits a pattern that a number of studies have shown over the years: how you act on your faith is going to have a larger impact on how your married life will go than how you religiously identify yourself. That’s a fancy way of saying that those of faith do best when they walk the talk. All talk and no walk does not get you anywhere beyond where you are now (because only your mouth is moving).

As CCF notes, it turns out that spouses who practice their faith together tend to have stronger marriages. If you are a couple of faith—and especially if you share the same faith—there is a pretty great question here: what are you doing that involves practicing your faith together?

Taken together, there are offsetting findings noted in the CCF release. On the one hand, a practice associated with some conservatively religious groups—marrying young—is truly associated with greater odds of divorce. On the other hand, the very kinds of practices often strongly recommended by these same groups—practicing your faith together—are associated with lower odds of divorce.  That, to me, is a more interesting paradox than the often noted finding that some religious groups have higher divorce rates than you'd expect. 

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[My colleagues and I just came out with the second edition of our book, A Lasting Promise. It is written for those who are interested in strengthening their marriages from a Christian tradition, and it includes a lot of both clear theological teachings and strategies based on solid research. If you are still reading this far and that question above about practicing your faith together has relevance for you, we deal with things like that in the book. Just sayin.]