Hollywood Shuffle

OK, perhaps the Celebritology blog isn't the place to complain about statistical terminology, but: "us regular Joes and Jills hover at about the 31st percentile" is incorrect. You mean "the rate is about 31 percent for us regular Joes and Jills." (Percentile refers to a position in a distribution, not a rate.)

"According to the story, us regular Joes and Jills hover at about the 31st percentile (which seems much lower than the "half of all marriages end in divorce" we normally hear)."

I assume first that by "31st percentile" you really mean that 31% of the population remarries (which is NOT the same as a percentile). As for the next part, the two statistics have nothing to do with one another. Divorce does not equal remarriage. If 50% of all marriages end in divorce and 31% of people have been remarried, it just means that some people get divorced and don't remarry.

To follow up on Anonymous and the article, although the remarriage rate is different than the divorce rate, the commonly cited "half of all marriages end in divorce" is incorrect as well.

This general statistic comes from counting the number of marriages in a year and the number of divorces in a year. So, if there were 1 million marriages and 500k divorces, this has been called a 50% divorce rate. Of course, that overlooks numerous problems.

First, those 500k divorces did not all result from marriages that occurred in the same year. Moreover, the number (50%) is incorrect. The actual number is about 45% or so. In addition, this does not take into account various factors that affect the likelihood of divorce. For example, the divorce rate of FIRST-TIME marriages is considerably lower than the overall divorce rate. That is, people who get divorced and remarried are more likely than average to get divorced a second (or third or fourth) time.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the only true way to get a divorce rate would be to perform a longitudinal study where you follow a cohort of marriages for one year (say, 1980) and see how many of them end up in divorce. Of course, your study won't be complete until they all die (say, 2060), but that would give you the correct divorce rat for that year.

The conventional way of calculating divorce rates is just stupid.

Apologies for the statistical term flub. There's a reason I was an English major.

But the percentages quoted are apples to apples, Anonymous, at least as printed in the Sun-Times.

The exact quote from the article is:

"Half of those celebs have already been divorced at least once -- while for the rest of us who have been married, that figure is 31 percent."

Liz:

A question that goes to your technical expertise: What should readers do to notify washingtonpost.com about technical problems. This morning, from 7:00 AM until at least 9:00 AM (when I left the site), the list of columnists on the pull-down menu on the left side of the homepage contained yesterday's list. I know there are other ways to find my favorite columnists, but that's the one I like best. It might be a problem to have all kinds of people notifying you about the same issue, but it seems like it would be good to have somebody responding to reader concerns in real time.

It would seem that the happiest unions are between people who are not in the same business. There are enough issues in marriage without adding competition between two equal professionals, especially in the public limelight. One silent partner can be the rock and compass for the visible one, regardless of the gender of the star and the strong, silent type.

Forget Gay men and Lesbians -- celebs are apparently the greatest threat to the "sanctity of marriage" and "the institution of the family"

THS, The best way to report a site problem is via the Customer Care center. You can access it via the "Help" link at the bottom of each page.

Why do celebs marry and divorce more frequently than regular folk?

Because they can afford it.

bc

bc has a point. Some time back there was a big experiment that involved providing a guaranteed income for poor people, and one of the main findings was that when people got a slightly better income---and note that we are talking about only a small increase over a small base---the divorce rate went up.

In the general population, the ability that women now have to support themselves has played a role in delaying the age of first marriages.

Re the customer care center, I'm not sure that's the right answer, unless messages sent there are being monitored more than I think is likely. I'm talking now not about site design issues (e.g., problems in navigating from place to place), but a specific glitch at a particular point in time. Perhaps the Post would prefer to detect and fix those problems on its own, but this was a fairly big glitch (i.e., not a typo) and it was in place for several hours.

Also, on a side note, that list of questions at customer care is WAY too long. Even if my question would go immediately to the right person, it's extremely unlikely that I wouldn't find the question in the first place because there are nine screens of questions. Need to redesign that list so that the questions are organized in terms of some higher-level categories w/ individual questions within them.

Sorry to clutter up your celebrity blog w/ these tech questions, but it was easier to return here than to go through those nine pages of questions!

Whoops! That last post re technical issues was from me . . . but you probably already knew that.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/celebritology/2006/04/holy_matrimony_batman.html#comments

Positing that "half of all marriges end in divorce", does not correlate directly with "31% of married people have been married before". The simplest reason is that not everyone who gets divorced will get married again. There are more complicated reasons as well. For example, if two sisters get married, one for life and the other five times in the same period, then between two people, you have six marriges, four of which ended in divorce, or 66%. Only half of the people (one sister) were married more than once.

Aren't numbers fun?

You people are giving me a headache...

bc I concur. Money seems to be one of the leading reasons these celebs break up. However, it is also fascinating that nearly 30 or so years ago, the same phenomena was happening as well. But, what I see then is that the ages or appearances of these celebs was far different. Hollywood seems to feed on keeping a slew of young immature celebs in turmoil, and whether or not it is planned to the point, whereby the celebs are active participants or not, it seems that the one constant to being in the limelight is to be rapidly involved in scandal and trouble.

Those who choose to live in that world become fodder for the tabloids and media, whilst gaining fortune and fame. The simple tradeoff seems to be real hapiness, in which does not equate to money, riches and fame. I watched recently an epidsode on Hallie Berry and thought--my God--she has been passed around from man to man more than a Dan Morino football. As a non-Hollywooder, I frankly couldn't imagine desiring a women for marriage who slept in every bed she landed.

It may be a welcome distraction to watch the lives of these folks, but we everyday 'Jack and Jills' should really count our blessings too. Many of us, inspite of not having the wheelbarrels full of money have somethings better than these folks can grasp, like family and spouses and real kids who we squeeze each night before going to bed.

For me, I'll choose real friends over fake ones any day.

The thing about your stats is, sure, 31% of people getting married may have been married before, and *also* half of all marriages end in divorce -- because a lot of those 31% of people have participated in more than one of those ending-in-divorced marriages.

I don't know who Ryan (4/18) is, but being a college prof who studies and teaches this topic, I can confirm that Ryan is the only blogger here who can be fully trusted. The rest of you have interesting but unconfirmed hunches. Also, after peaking in 1979, the U.S. divorce rate has declined nearly 20% since then. Of course, it increased more than 100% during the previous quarter century, but that's old news. Trust me.