been reading a lot over at robert's place in the last week or so. several different posts and so no single post is really applicable to link to here. but there's this person "shaw" who has posted a few times that
massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate per 1000 people of any state in the nation.
robert tried to challenge him, but he never quite responded with anything more than the information in his original comment. so it got me to thinking, and researching, about this topic. what i found wasn't quite so straight forward as shaw and the op-ed page of the boston globe would have us believe.
this post doesn't even begin to examine the sanctity of marriage as one man and one woman. this deals strictly with trends in marriages and divorces in our great nation.
according the to the boston globe op-ed, from just about 3 years ago, william d'antonio posits that based on the latest data massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. the divorce rate per 1000 people, for 2002, in the state of massachusetts is 2.4 (or 2.5 depending on the source). conversely, according to that same data, the divorce rate in the state of texas is 4.1. well it certainly sounds like married people in massachusetts have a better chance of "making it" - doesn't it?
according to the op-ed:
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those
with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
not so fast, bozo boy. first of all, when did arizona become a "southern state"? also, that number is per 1000 people in the state. how many people in the state got married? what is the percentage of people who marry that end up in divorce. how are "marriages" counted? upon further review, the rates listed per 1000 people aren't really so impressive. i found the rates at the cdc and they appear to be the same ones referenced by this doc. i also found them from the census bureau, but they didn't have it such a nifty document...
for instance when you compare the divorce rates for the the nine northeast states he lists as among the lowest divorce rates you will notice that they do not have such a high marriage rate, either. so to extrapolate the information for the actual divorce rate you merely need to divide the divorces per 1000 people by the marriages per 1000 people.
for instance the nine lowest states by percentage of people divorcing vs. marrying is are south carolina (37%), south dakota (38%), tennessee (39%), utah (39%), massachusetts (42%), rhode island (42%), arkansas (43%), vermont (43%), and illinois (44%). so essentially, massachusetts, rhode island and vermont stay in the top nine. south carolina moves to the number spot in terms of lowest rate of divorce and arkansas moves the bottom nine to the top nine...
i do feel it is important to note that i exclude hawaii and nevada because the numbers for those states are skewed by the sheer number of people who get married there and then go home (for instance nevada is 67.4 marriages out of 1000 people with a percentage of divorce of 11%). i also ignored states for whom there is no data for both divorce and marriage for the 2002 year. a friend of mine points out that this necessarily skews the numbers for the rest of the country, but i can only do so much with the data presented to me.
the nine highest rates of divorce become mississippi (77%), arizona (71%), washington (71%), west virginia (64%), pennsylvania (60%), colorado (59%), connecticut (58%), michigan (58%) and new jersey (57%). that makes three of the best nine in the divorces per 1000 people fall to the worst nine in percentages of divorce versus marriage. only arizona and mississippi are in the bottom nine in both lists. the rest are all in the middle somewhere. the percentage of people, nationwide, who get divorced vs. married (including hawaii and nevada) is 49%. texas is the worst on the list in terms of divorces per 1000 people, but it's below the national average with a percentage of 46.
i'm pretty certain that south carolina, illinois, tennessee, and arkansas are in the bible belt and they're in the lowest nine states for percentage of divorces vs. marriages. also, utah has an extremely religious population and they're in the best nine as well. and six out of the nine highest in terms of divorces vs. marriages are very liberal states.
so what is one to surmise from all this number crunching and data? beats me. but i'm pretty sure it doesn't mean that you're less likely to get a divorce is you live in massachusetts. or more likely to get a divorce is you live in texas or "the bible belt". please tell me i'm not the only one who thinks the boston op-ed is just a tad offbase.