A widely reported finding that the risk of divorce increases when wives fall ill — but not when men do — is invalid, thanks to a short string of mistaken coding that negates the original conclusions, published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

The paper, “In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life,” garnered coverage in many news outlets, including The Washington Post, New York magazine’s The Science of Us blog, The Huffington Post, and the UK’s Daily Mail .

But an error in a single line of the coding that analyzed the data means the conclusions in the paper — and all the news stories about those conclusions — are “more nuanced,” according to first author Amelia Karraker, an assistant professor at Iowa State University.

...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Steve@communick.news 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Interesting. The corrected data still leans in that direction.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine worked a few years helping people after traumatic brain injuries. She noticed the women always had a husband to help with their care, but all the men were devorced and alone.

[–] norimee@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

Your anecdotal experience doesn't take into account weather the patients were divorced following the injury or if they were unmarried before the injury to begin with.

The study was looking into something totaly different.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 3 points 2 months ago

The study is also looking at a complex thing like interpersonal relationships. Some people who are sick or have issues blame the people helping them. My wife gets upset I do not care enough about her issues when I am working on work, and our finances, and all our other stuff that have to be in line so that she can get the best care we can. She likes to bring up divorce even though she would be utterly fucked in that scenario. If she were married to another type of man she would be one of these statistics. Im not saying that is the only reason as I have seen sickly men act like this to.

[–] ericjmorey@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

That's an interesting observation, it'd be interesting to see what could be the reason why that pattern might hold in a proper survey. But it could just be chance that it was that way at that particular facility.