4/15/2008

Do Girls Cause Divorce?

In this article there were many things discussed about divorce. There is a lot of research and there are a lot of people reading the research to "create" facts. There is a relationship between low income and divorce but it is unclear which comes first. The part of the article I found interesting was that couples were more likely to get divorced if their first born was a girl. The other thing that I found alarming was that non traditional families cost the American people "$112 billion per year, or $1 trillion each decade" in taxes. That is money coming out our pockets. This statistic really surprised me. There are tax benefits to getting married and there aren't benefits to getting divorced. As I continued to read this article I realized that we all need to be careful of the facts we are believing, and the evidence that are supporting the conclusions. This article did a good job of explaining both sides in the end.

3 comments:

Dr. Tufte said...

Carter, you have part of it backwards. The tax benefits are for not getting married. And yet these families suck up more on the spending side.

The relationship between the sex of the first child and divorce is new, but it has already held up to quite a bit of scrutiny. It seems men want to hang around their boys more ...

Victoria said...

I think this article is interesting to read, but I don't think this article is realistc especially part of"couples were more likely to get divorced if their first born was a girl."

Dr. Tufte said...

-1 on Victoria for a spelling error.

The point of doing research is that you can check whether things that seem unrealistic actually are.

Part of what you should learn in college is not to criticize research for getting results that you don't agree with, but instead to recognize that someone else has put the "ball in your court" and you either have to accept it or go out and prove it's wrong.