Survey Results - Third Question: Causes of Divorce

[Dan]

Approximately 40 percent of people taking the survey are divorced from their cross-cultural spouse. To gain insight into those aspects, including several unique to cross-cultural marriages, that contribute to divorce, we asked them to rate each of the same 12 factors on a scale from 1 to 5, with these instructions:

Score of 1 means it was NO
factor in your divorce. Score
of 5 means it was a
MAJOR factor in your
divorce.

For this poll, we will see if our group selects the same Top 3 factors contributing to divorce, as our survey shows.

- Dan

[zack]

It's too bad that "marrying too rapidly" or something similar like "not knowing each other enough" isn't one of the choices.

This is arguably the largest contributing factor to cross-cultural divorces in my opinion.

[Dan]

It's too bad that "marrying too rapidly" or something similar like "not knowing each other enough" isn't one of the choices.

This is arguably the largest contributing factor to cross-cultural divorces in my opinion.

zack,

Check out my response to a similar question you raised. Here is a link -- http://www.planet-love.com/forum/index.php?topic=3856.msg42172#msg42172.

I think that data addresses some, or most, of your question. Does it?

- Dan

[zack]

zack,

Check out my response to a similar question you raised. Here is a link -- http://www.planet-love.com/forum/index.php?topic=3856.msg42172#msg42172.

I think that data addresses some, or most, of your question. Does it?

- Dan

Yes, it does. It supports what I have been asserting all along. Strange that people in the "less than 2 weeks" category have a significantly lower divorce rate than "2 to 4 weeks", but then again it is only a study. No study is air-tight. One could argue that people are more likely to be honest about their successes than their failures. If I married a Colombian after only one week of meeting her and then later divorced, that would be the last story that I would want to share with someone. Talk about embarrasing.

Zack

[jm21-2]

Maybe some of the 1-2 week ones had long communication beforehand (this seems to happen a lot on the Asian board...12 months communication then meet for a week and get married)? Whereas 2-4 weeks might be people who met someone at an agency, spent 2-3 weeks together, and got married. Or maybe the one weekers saw the thing in a more businesslike manner or had lower expectations. Or maybe the sample is just naturally a bit skewed...

It's interesting data nonetheless. Kinda wish it was separated by region (FSU/Latin/Asian).

[Dan]

This is one of the questions in which there was a great disparity in gender responses. There are two numbers in the cells - the first number is the mean score of all responses, and the number inside the parens is the ranking of that number relative to the other scores.

	Finances	Sex	Abuse	Infidelity	Children	Family	Stress	Language	Cultural	Communication	Commitment	Goals
Men	2.45(6)	2.62(4)	1.96(10)	2.55(5)	1.61(12)	2.04(9)	2.39(7)	1.62(11)	2.11(8)	2.83(3)	3.24(1)	3.04(2)
Women	2.65(6)	2.67(5)	3.24(1)	2.27(9)	1.75(11)	2.12(10)	2.73(4)	1.55(12)	2.41(8)	2.73(3)	2.53(7)	3.00(2)

Note the remarkable consistency between the rankings, save for two items that were nearly polar opposite.

- Dan