The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010
Open accessAbstract
This article critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data have led some analysts to conclude that divorce has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the age composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over age 35. Among the youngest couples, however, divorce rates are stable or declining. If current trends continue, overall age-standardized divorce rates could level off or even decline over the next few decades. We argue that the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The deinstitutionalization of American marriage
Cherlin, A. J. (2004) · Journal of Marriage and Family · doi:10.1111/j.0022-2445.2004.00058.x · Cited by 1,769
National Center for Health Statistics ( NCHS )
Feinleib, M. (2005) · Encyclopedia of Biostatistics · doi:10.1002/0470011815.b2a16042 · Cited by 1,574
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series
Ruggles, S., Genadek, K., Goeken, R., Grover, J., & Sobek, M. (2015) · Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation · doi:10.18128/d010.v6.0 · Cited by 1,485
Self-citationFienberg, S. E., & Tanur, J. M. (2016) · Wiley StatsRef: Statistics Reference Online · doi:10.1002/9781118445112.stat00032.pub2 · Cited by 1,379
Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces
Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.21.2.27 · Cited by 786
Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage.
Rueschemeyer, M., & Cherlin, A. J. (1983) · Social Forces · doi:10.2307/2578169 · Cited by 774
Recent trends in marital disruption
Martin, T. C., & Bumpass, L. L. (1989) · Demography · doi:10.2307/2061492 · Cited by 649
“Everything's There Except Money”: How Money Shapes Decisions to Marry Among Cohabitors
Smock, P. J., Manning, W. D., & Porter, M. (2005) · Journal of Marriage and Family · doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2005.00162.x · Cited by 491
The Gray Divorce Revolution: Rising Divorce Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults, 1990-2010
Brown, S. L., & Lin, I.-F. (2012) · The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences · doi:10.1093/geronb/gbs089 · Cited by 480
ADVANCE REPORT OF FINAL NATALITY STATISTIC, 1992
Ventura, S. J., Martin, J. A., Taffel, S. M., Mathews, T. J., & Clarce, S. C. (1994) · Cited by 475
Cited by
Divorce, Repartnering, and Stepfamilies: A Decade in Review
Raley, R. K., & Sweeney, M. M. (2020) · Journal of Marriage and Family · doi:10.1111/jomf.12651 · Cited by 452
Cohabitation and Marriage: Complexity and Diversity in Union‐Formation Patterns
Sassler, S., & Lichter, D. T. (2020) · Journal of Marriage and Family · doi:10.1111/jomf.12617 · Cited by 328
An Implementation Study of Relationship Checkups as Home Visitations for Low‐Income At‐Risk Couples
Coop Gordon, K., Cordova, J. V., Roberson, P. N. E., Miller, M., Gray, T., Lenger, K. A., Hawrilenko, M., & Martin, K. (2019) · Family Process · doi:10.1111/famp.12396 · Cited by 39
Metadata
- Authors
- Kennedy, S., & Ruggles, S.
- Venue
- Demography
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2014-01-08
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 587-598
- ISSN
- 0070-3370 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-7790
- OpenAlex
- W2111969938
- Cited by
- 272
- References
- 24
- FWCI
- 71.61
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1007/s13524-013-0270-9
- The paper
- Kennedy, S., & Ruggles, S. (2014). Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010. Demography. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0270-9
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
