Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway From: turpin@cs.utexas.EDU (Russell Turpin) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Post-divorce quality of life (was: feminism ... done for men) Summary: Statistics, damn statistics, and lies. Message-ID: <14993@cs.utexas.edu> Date: 26 Nov 90 17:41:45 GMT References: <18940@oolong.la.locus.com> <657517070@lear.cs.duke.edu> Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas Lines: 32 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: zola.ics.uci.edu In article kaveh@ms.uky.edu (Kaveh Baharestan) writes: > That's true only if he pays alimony, and then not really. A > while back I got some stats on divores. The man's quality > of living goes up 30% and the woman's (who usually has the > kids) goes down 60%. Note: I could be wrong on the > percentages but I am not wrong on the unevenness of quality > of living. ... Most likely, you're dead wrong. Like all such statistics, before knowing what it means, one has to know how it was created. Did the study look at divorces resulting from the judgments in one area at one time, or just at a broad collection of divorced couples? (Divorce judgments have changed a lot in the last fifteen years in some states. Lumping together divorces that took place in Texas fifteen years ago with divorces that take place today in California is guaranteed to generate useless numbers.) Most importantly, one has to ask how the study defined "quality of life". Many men would say that in the only regard that is really important, to wit, whether they can continue a parental relationship with their children, they lose hands down almost every time the issue is contested. Of course, if the study is designed so that custody is viewed only as a cost, then women seem to lose. For example, I have no doubt that many divorced men have more "free time" than their ex-wives. The problem is that they would rather have their children back than the "free time" that absence creates. Thus, a "well designed" study can show that the losers are winners and winners are losers. Russell