Sociology / Unit 8 Soc 1309 short lesson, about 20 seconds
The Divorce Rate: How It's Computed
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The idea
A divorce rate can be built several ways: one year's marriages against that year's divorces, ever-married people who later divorced, or a tracked cohort, each yielding a different number.
In practice
Comparing one year's marriage count to that year's divorce count treats two unrelated statistics as one story.
Where people slip
A single reported divorce-rate figure hides which of these incompatible methods produced it.
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