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An article entitled "The Decline of the Traditional Family"
appeared in the February 4, 1999, edition of the UB Reporter,
a campus newspaper at the State University of New York at Buffalo (Donovan
1999). In the article, Lynn Magdol, assistant professor of sociology,
states that:
Marriage and family are idealized in this country, and, officially
at least, we hold them to be sacred. On the face of it, our behavior
seems to support that position. Nearly all of us express a desire
for an exclusive, intimate association; at least 90 percent of us
say we want to marry, most of us do and the majority of us want
to have children.
She goes on to say, however, that "as traditionally constituted
… marriage and family apparently aren’t satisfying the social and intimacy
needs of many people." The article cites the following evidence:
Although most Americans do marry at some point, they are delaying
marriage until they are older. Once married, demographers project
that married couples have a 50 percent chance of divorcing. Andrew
Cherlin, a leading family demographer, notes that the divorce rate
in the 1980s was twice what it was in the 1950s, and has declined
only moderately since then. "To put this in another perspective,"
says Magdol, "in 1880, two of every 1,000 couples divorced
each year. Today, 20 of every 1,000 couples divorce each year--a
10-fold increase over 100 years."
After presenting these somewhat dismaying statistics, the article reassures
the reader of the importance of marriage by stating:
No one need worry that marriage is dead, however. Magdol points
out that there are many physical, emotional, social and economic
benefits offered to those who are married. Even if we experience
divorce, we tend to remarry.
Questions
- Consider the statistics for divorce in America today as reported
in the second paragraph of evidence. Why does one sentence claim a
50 percent chance of divorcing and another state a 20 out of 1000
chance? What is the difference between these statistics?
- Using this statistical evidence, perform a Markov chain analysis
of marriage and divorce. For each time period cited (1880, 1950s,
1980s, and today), construct a Markov chain model that will predict
the chance of a couple eventually divorcing. How much more likely
are today’s couples to end up divorcing than in the 1880s? Is it a
10-fold increase? Explain why or why not.
- Assume that a divorced person will remarry this year with probability
p > 0. Adjust your model to estimate, in today’s era, the
fraction of time that a person spends married (from first marrying
until death). How does this percentage vary with p? Can you
find an estimate of p?
- How valid are these models? What assumptions are you making? What
are the strengths and weaknesses of a Markovian approach to analyzing
marriage?
Date Posted: mb 01/29/01
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