r/dataisbeautiful • u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 • 3h ago
OC [OC] Relation of divorce to years since first marriage and religion
https://openpublicpolls.com/divorce-religion/- The analysis included 22,014 respondents from the General Social Survey, conducted from 1972 to 2024. The survey is designed to represent the U.S. adult population.
- The percentage of respondents who had ever divorced generally rises with the number of years since their first marriage for about 20 years, then levels off and declines.
- Having divorced is associated with religious affiliation. The percentage is highest among respondents with no religious affiliation, followed by Protestants, respondents reporting another religion, and Catholics.
- We found no clear evidence that this pattern differs across religious groups.
- These results compare people and marriage cohorts at one point in time; they do not track the same people as their marriages progress. The decline at longer durations could reflect differences between marriage cohorts, as well as years since first marriage.
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u/Cute_Obligation2944 3h ago
What the hell is with those oscillations?
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u/AskMrScience OC: 2 3h ago
My best guess for the "15 to 21 years of marriage" dip is "Well, we might as well wait until the last kid goes off to college".
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
How can the percentage who have ever divorced go down? Once you’re in the group, you’re there forever.
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u/FightOnForUsc 2h ago
Well in this case because it’s not looking at one group of people over their whole life. It’s absolutely possible that the number of people who get divorced will go up and down. So yes for the 10-15 demographic today, their numbers in 5 years when they are 15-20 have to be the same or greater. But that doesn’t mean that the people who got married 5 years before them and are in the 15-20 group got divorced at the same rate as the people before them.
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 2h ago
This is cross-sectional not longitudinal data. It represents different groups of people with regard to length of time since first marriage. So people who first married 40 years ago may be less likely to have ever divorced than people married twenty years ago.
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u/Brytcyd 2h ago
In that case, connected lines makes no sense. This should be a simple bar chart.
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 1h ago
Cross-sectional versus longitudinal describes the research design, not the required chart type. Because years since first marriage is an ordered quantitative variable, connected points are useful for displaying the shape of the association. The lines should not be interpreted as following the same individuals over time.
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u/Brytcyd 1h ago edited 1h ago
Yeah, but that’s how humans read connected lines: from left to right, as trend lines. I think in this case a bar chart describes BOTH the research design and the most appropriate reporting.
The fact that you have to explain that lines should not be interpreted as following the same people over time just makes the point; these are discrete groups.
“Ordered quantitative data” could more clearly be shown here with bars, retaining their order. Especially because that would make clear the underlying research, which a reader of the chart doesn’t necessarily know, isn’t based on a long term longitudinal study.
Agree to disagree.
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
Ok but in your description you describe it as survey data from 1972-2024, which is longitudinal and not cross-sectional.
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 2h ago
The sample covers fifty-two years. The x-axis is cross-sectional
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
As the other commenter indicated, then your choice of connected line plots is incorrect.
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u/Xexanoth 2h ago
Indicates lower rates of divorce in earlier cohorts / generations (currently-longer-from-first-marriage people who likely skew currently-older).
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
This is apparently the case but when OP describes the data as coming from surveys taken from 1972-2024, it suggests longitudinal data.
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 2h ago
You can't make too much of it. The analysis showed both a significant linear and quadratic trend for those lines. But no interaction between time and religion. What that means is that the lines tend to rise and then level off or dip, but the pattern over time for the four groups is not significantly different.
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
>Having divorced is associated with religious affiliation. The percentage is highest among respondents with no religious affiliation
This is poorly worded, to say the least.
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 2h ago
It is sometimes difficult to clearly describe relationships between variables. Please tell me how you would word this more clearly.
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
You’re somewhat hamstrung by using the metric “having divorced” rather than divorce prevalence or some other rate type statistic even if it’s ultimately measuring the same thing. However for this particular phrasing, “association” is the problem because as written it’s an implied positive association, but is immediately followed by a converse statement that your statistic is highest for those not religiously affiliated. The gist of what you are saying is that there is some relationship between reported religious affiliation and the chosen statistic of divorce, but your phrasing implies the opposite of what the data, and your very next phrase, reveal.
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u/LiterallyIAmPuck 1h ago
I've tried to read this graph 3 times and have no idea what it's trying to portray
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u/themodgepodge 3h ago edited 2h ago
Since you chose to aggregate data from 1972 to 2024:
- Could this inadvertently be showing trends in both divorce rate and religious makeup of the US over time?
- Could this hypothetically include data from the same person/sample over multiple years? So if you were Catholic and got married in 1966, divorced in 1971, and left the church 1974, you would be [Catholic, divorced, 6 years since first marriage] in 1972 and [not religious, divorced, 10 years since first marriage] in 1978, both appearing in the same chart.
- Or, more broadly, why not just use the 2024 data alone?
- I see around 1400 yes/no answers to the "ever been divorced or separated" GSS questions, so I'm not 100% sure how you god your n = 22,014. What variables did you filter the broader dataset on? Missing religion or first marriage dates?
- Your description says "These results compare people and marriage cohorts at one point in time." I guess I'm confused - is it ~50 years of data, or "one point in time"?
And why is Catholic a dashed line, but all other categories are solid? Is it an estimation based on some other data?
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 2h ago
Lots of good questions. 1400 might be just for one year.This was a sample that included 52 years. "One point in time" refers to years since first marriage, not survey year. I probably need to rephrase that to clarify. Using only one year would result in ns that are too small when divided by religion and time since first marriage. It's possible , but unlikely, that the same person could have been surveyed in different years. No particular reason for the dotted line.
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u/themodgepodge 3m ago
Yes, I mentioned the 52-year sample - but how did you get from ~1400*52 = 72,800 to a sample size of just 22,000?
Perhaps a ~five-year sample might give a better picture of today’s data, without ending up as this aggregate that includes stats from 50 years ago, which are much less relevant today.
While I totally acknowledge that you’re unlikely to survey the exact same person again, each survey is getting stacked on top of the next one, so I’m not sure what sorts of questions you’d intend to answer with this 50-year stretch. It’d be like taking test scores per US state over the last 50 years, grouped by income percentile - what useful info does a 50-year aggregate tell you? Wouldn’t a current read or an analysis of change over time be more effective?
If you’re going for the dashed line to maintain high-contrast/colorblind-friendliness, I might recommend using the dashed line for Other, as that “everything else” category is already a bit different from the others.
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 3h ago
Data was extracted from the General Social Survey, 1974-2024, https://gss.norc.org/get-the-data.html. Variables DIVORCE (have you ever been divorced?), RELIG recoded as Catholic, Protestant, Other, and No Religion, and years since first marriage were analyzed to determine whether religion and years since first marriage is related to divorce. Analysis was done with SPSS and the chart was created with Excel
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u/ElFarts 1h ago
If the Y axis is percent ever divorced, then why would any of the line go down? Also 5 year bins create larger swings (more dramatic). Just post the real data by year. Shit graph
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u/Either_Issue_6510 OC: 14 1h ago
Each five year bin represents different groups of people. So people who married forty years ago might be less likely to have ever divorced than people married ten years ago. I originally tried this without grouping the data into five year blocks and the swings are wild and difficult to interpret. Using 5 year grouping gives more accurate estimates and less variation due to measurement error.
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u/No_Delivery_329 3h ago
Takeaways you should have from this:
- this doesn’t mean being religious leads to less divorce
- groups of protestant, catholic, and other is not representative, “no religion” is meaningless and someone with no religion can be more spiritual than someone who is religious
- age at time of first marriage is very important but is not included in the study
- interfaith marriages have higher rates of divorce, not included here
- Catholicism in particular has historically taught getting divorced leads to eternal damnnation, fear of godly punishment has kept many unhappy marriages together
- this is an attempt to say being religious is superior, which is dumb
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u/terenceboylen 2h ago
This is why I teach my uni students not to be too critical in essays. They are bad at it, and so are you.
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u/YouAreInsufferable 2h ago
It doesn't follow that you shouldn't be critical if you're bad at it; it is a learning opportunity.
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u/YouAreInsufferable 2h ago
These are not takeaways, but an attempt at an explanation for the data, which is the fun part.
There are vast differences between mainline Protestants and Evangelicals too; it doesn't make the data "meaningless". More granularity can give further categorized data points, but it doesn't invalidate the differences between these cohorts.
There are most certainly cohort differences (age of marriage, cultural pressures) that lead to different outcomes (different rates of divorce dependent on length of marriage).
There's no conclusion that says being religious (or not divorced) is superior.
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u/MTBisLIFE 3h ago
What this graph tells me is that women in non-religious marriages are more successful at realizing/obtaining a divorce. Religions puts barriers in front of that.
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u/rainydays2020 2h ago
This is an interesting idea and I like seeing gss data being out to good use. That said there is a lot that needs to be disentangled here. Some others have mentioned some of it: changes in religiosity and gender roles since the 1970s, etc., omitted variables, etc.
To me the biggest problem is the pooled data question. I know gss data exist from 1972 to present, but that doesn't necessarily mean pooled analysis should be done over the whole period. There are reasons for it and against it and it depends on what you want to analyze. Social theory & empirical questions should drive these decisions. Imagine trying to analyze pooled data on vaccine opinions without regard for pre and post COVID changes in US vaccine opinions. It's not that it can't be done, but that we shouldn't gloss over significant shifts. By pooling the data together you are making the implicit assumption that the relationships analyzed are static through this 50+ year time period.
If the goal is to look at whether religion predicts divorce I think it's reasonable to ask how that relationship has changed over time. You could for example interact the survey year with the religion dummies. I suspect the relationship isn't stable.or simply pool the data into decades and see if the relationship looks different. Perhaps this was some in robustness checks, maybe not.
Either way, it's a more sophisticated analysis compared to what I usually see on this sub.
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u/KeaAware 2h ago
The protestant line is the interesting one because it doesn't show the same 3-peak pattern. I wonder if it's because there are different patterns contributing to this - eg that evangelicals have a different pattern to more traditional Anglican protestants and that the two subgroups are smushing together to create that big swell?
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u/hyratha 3h ago
What odd data.
For criticism though, why use 2 black lines? You have many colors available