Be careful with drawing conclusions from these stats. You need to know the full details and even then you have to be careful interpreting too much into them. It may be entirely possible that the Catholics questioned had a high proportion of people who married because of love rather than familial / peer / faith pressure. The JWs might have a much higher % that married due to pressures other than love. Thus you could create a subset of those in both sets who married for love and that might show a very different picture - it might be that a higher % JWs married for love stay together than Catholics who married for love.
We might find that Catholics married later in life and so had lower expectations and different priorities to young marrieds. Catholics may have more children and so are more likely to stay together. The emotional / social / financial cost of divorce may be greater for Catholics (maybe they are richer on average, maybe they have larger extended families reducing opportunities to stray etc)
There may be culturl reasons as well - if the Catholics draw most of their members from the Irish while the JWs draw mainly from Hispanic groups is there something within the cultures that shows strong biases - maybe the groups that JWs derive their membership from have a very high divorce rate that being a JW reverses?
Maybe the JW stats are merely based upon converting many people who are quite often in need of support (maybe after a divorce!) while Catholics draw from more emotionally stable or born ins.
Anyway you get the picture.
In my family we have a history of divorce somewhat influenced by one side of the relationship being LDS and the other not. This is somewhat balanced by those who married with both partners in the faith none of whom have divorced yet (3 divorces - mixed faith, 11 marriages still going strong - both partners LDS, 3 marriages still going strong - mixed faith.)
JW divorce rate higher than adverage - pew forum
by drew sagan 16 Replies latest jw friends
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Qcmbr
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Marked for reference
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Layla33
I totally believe one of the reasons is that there is a higher incidence of forcing people to get married to the first person they show the least amount of romantic interest or because they may have had a sexual encounter to avoid DFs. In the young age that so many get married has to be a reason.
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grassyknoll07
The sampling for JW households was 215 with a +-7.5% margin of error. Question 18 is a good indication about the "quality" of the sampling. It asks "Would you describe yourself as a "born again" or evangelical Christian, or not? 17% of so-called JWs answered yes. (huh? Really, these people are JWs?) The marriage question asks "Are you currently married, living with a partner, divorced, separated, widowed, or have never been married?" 1% of so-called JWs answered they are living with a partner (huh?). Also, the questions does not ask if they became divorced as a JW, it simply asks about their CURRENT status. Oh and the "I know 5 JW couples that are divorced" statement is not research folks.
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grassyknoll07
2007 peak JWs in the US was 1,084,005. Divide that by the research sampling of 215 and you get about .0198% of JWs. It will be interesting to see the full report. Pew has withheld some questions for further release.
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bigmouth
This pew thing has been quite interesting. But with regard to the 14% divorce rate I think qcmbr is correct viz "....people who are quite often in need of support (maybe after a divorce!)"
It may possibly be that a large percentage of these divorcees are sisters whose husbands committed adultery when they started attending meetings / studying etc. etc. You know the story ;( -
DaCheech
I have a couple in my family too