A widely reported finding that the risk of divorce increases when wives fall ill — but not when men do — is invalid, thanks to a short string of mistaken coding that negates the original conclusions, published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

The paper, “In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life,” garnered coverage in many news outlets, including The Washington Post, New York magazine’s The Science of Us blog, The Huffington Post, and the UK’s Daily Mail .

But an error in a single line of the coding that analyzed the data means the conclusions in the paper — and all the news stories about those conclusions — are “more nuanced,” according to first author Amelia Karraker, an assistant professor at Iowa State University.

  • gjoel@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    Oh… I thought divorce rates increased when wives fell ill or when they got attacked with an ax. Which honestly feels like a good reason for divorce.

    • Swedneck
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      3 months ago

      back in my days women knew their place, which is in the shower with a murderer slowly pulling back the drapes while raising their weapon dramatically