Misreading Marriage Statistics

Phil Cohen, a sociologist at UNC, offers a useful lesson in some of the ways press coverage of family issues can go wrong. In this case, we see the dangers of reading too many conclusions into your survey data and the misconceptions that are possible when you "assume divorce rates are always going up." (As Cohen explained in greater detail in an earlier post -- and as we've discussed here on Hit & Run in the past -- divorce has actually been declining for decades.)