MARRIAGE/DIVORCE STATISTICS
There’s good news for the American family: the glum statistics that say half of the marriages end in divorce are wrong, according to pollster Louis Harris. Actually, only 1 in 8 marriages end in divorce, Harris said. Americans have been led to believe for the last half-decade that the institution of marriage is decaying since the government’s National Center for Health Statistics revealed that there had been 2.4 million new marriages and 1.2 million divorces in 1981. Overlooked in calculating the divorce statistics is the number of already existing marriages. “What was left out is that there are 54 million other marriages that are going on very nicely, thank you,” he said. Each year only 2 percent of existing marriages will actually end in divorce, according to calculations by Harris which combine ongoing and new marriages. A statistician with the U. S. Census Bureau agreed that the divorce statistics presented for the last few years have been deceiving because the number of…
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