Common statistics
When you hear about divorce rates, it is often presented in a certain way. For instance, you might hear that the divorce rate is around 2.9 out of 1000 people getting divorced. These numbers require a bit of comprehension to understand, afterwhich the person reading such a statement may begin questioning, how that statistic is applicable to the
average individual looking to get married.
The "2.9 out of 1000 people getting divorced" indicates the number of divorces per 1000 individuals in a given population within a year. It offers a snapshot of divorces relative to the population size.
While a high divorce rate number appears jarring at first, understand that such a number does nothing distinguish the cohort of marriage that it stems from and for what reason that might have arisen. This is especially important
considering the duration of said marriages. It also does nothing to illustrate the reasons and the potential changes in said reasons for initiating a divorce.
The most commonly reported annual statistics we can find are typically, duration of marriages that divorced, total number of marriages commenced, age group of brides and grooms (separately), age group of divorcees and perhaps
age differential of marriages. None of this is presented in a multifactorial manner, with time being the only common column/variable shared between datasets, making establishing any direct links between divorce and other factors
indirect, and therefore, relatively unreliable.
People or Married People?
The average person, especially men, does not wish to get divorced (and rightfully so). It comes with immense consequences.
For such a person, it is typical for them to want to quantify the probability of divorce and this would reasonably be estimated from the ratio/proportion of marriages that end in divorce.
Already, we see a chasm between the information that we regularly receive, versus what a prospective husband might want to know.
Almost expectantly, this data is not readily available to us, and can only be obtained by working backwards, using the duration of marriages prior to divorce reported every year and cross referencing them with the yearly reported number of commenced marriages.
Note that the resolution of the resultant ratio/proportion of marriages ending in divorce is dependent on the size of the duration buckets in the data we work with. In New Zealand's case, like
most other countries, the resultant resolution is 5 years. (except America so far)
Dataset Quality
New Zealand's extensive dataset allows for the observation of a plateau effect in divorce rates for different cohorts.
New Zealand's data collection is unique, tracking divorce durations up to 40 years of marriage compared to other countries that typically stop at around 30 years.
Fun fact: NZ is also the only country that appears to voluntarily calculate and present
the proportion of marriages that actually end in divorce, as opposed to just divorce rate amongst the general population on their government website. Other governments so far, do not willfully present this data.
∼40%
With more time, the proportion of marriages that end in divorce increases. This increase generally decreases over time, reaching a state of "equilibrium" so to speak. In other words, the older a marriage, the less likely it is to end in a divorce.
About 40% of marriages in NZ end in divorce.
Divorce rates are calculable from 1960 onwards. So the dataset is far more extensive than what we are used to from other countries.
The year in which the marriage commenced, clearly has a correlation with the probability of it ending in a divorce.
The most significant contributor to the increase in proportion of marriages ending divorce are the younger marriages. A greater portion of marriages are ending younger. It has become most common for marriages to end between 5-15 years.
There is clearly an increasing in divorce rates within younger marriages. For marriages starting in the 1960s, less than 25% of them ended in divorce within 30 years. In contrast, marriages commencing in the 1980s generally reached 25% divorce rate
within 20 years.
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