The divorce rate in the US may have been increasing over the last 40 years, rather than slowly declining as previously thought, according to a new report from the University of Minnesota.
The report [1], authored by Sheela Kennedy and Steven Ruggles, argues that previous metrics used to estimate the divorce rate were flawed, and tended to underestimate the rate of divorce among older people. However, the authors say that new divorce-related questions from the US Census bureau have enabled them to update the estimates.
“For many years, the pattern of divorce across age groups indicated that divorce increased in young people until around 25 years of age and then steadily declined among older people. Looking more closely at these data, it becomes apparent that in the more recent decades, the divorce rate has not been declining as rapidly for those over age 35. The result is that people well into their 60s are divorcing at a higher rate than in previous decades” wrote Robert Hughes Jr, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois, about the new study.
Kennedy and Ruggles claim that this doubling of divorce rates among people over 35 means that there was “actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008.”
The report also finds that the increase in the divorce rate may be levelling off, with under-35s much less likely to divorce. But the authors say that “the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage.”
Professor Hughes writes [2] in the Huffington Post:
“Another lesson from this work is that ‘divorce rates’ cannot continue to be our primary measure of ‘marital stability.’ At least part of the decline in marital breakup among younger people is that more couples, especially young couples, are cohabitating instead of, or prior to, marriage. There is much evidence that these relationships are more unstable than marriages. However, these data are not included when we talk about divorce rates. If we want a good estimate of ‘relationship stability,’ we need data that combines cohabitation breakups [and] divorce. These combined rates would give us a much better picture of the real patterns of stability or instability in couple relationships.”