Upon further review, Facebook and marriage aren't incompatible.
In the past two weeks, the idea that the popular social-networking site plays a role in one in five divorces was reported by many news organizations. This wasn't the first time that surprising number has surfaced—it has appeared in news reports periodically for the past year and a half.
Some lawyers do say that they see Facebook and other social media playing a role in divorce these days, as people rediscover old flames online or strike up new relationships that lead them to stray from their marriage vows. But lawyers and marriage researchers say there isn't much evidence to support the notion that social-networking sites actually cause marriages to sputter.
Yet the 1-in-5 number has thrived in part because it helps fill a vacuum: There isn't much reliable research about what does cause divorce. Academic researchers don't even agree on how to approach the question. Some have searched for predictive demographic factors, such as age and income. Others have studied married couples' relationships to see which characteristics presage a split. Determining whether a couple is likely to break up, though, is different than identifying the actual cause.
Only a few studies have surveyed divorcees directly at the time of their divorce. One by two Pennsylvania State University researchers used as its data source 2,033 married people who had agreed to be tracked in 1980. By 1997, barely half were still reachable and amenable to interviews; of those, about one in five had gotten divorced and would discuss it. That left 208 people to be studied, a relatively small sample. And the rates of reported reasons differed between men and women. Some 9% of women ascribed their divorce to mental or physical abuse, while no men did; conversely, 9% of men said they didn't know the cause, while none of the women said this.
Even numbers on overall U.S. divorce rates are spotty. NCHS reclassified its divorce statistics as "provisional" in 1996, reflecting budgetary constraints at the agency that hampered data collection and the lack of reporting from California and a few other states that stopped tracking divorce. The figures for 2009, for example, exclude California and five other states that together contain 21% of the U.S. population.
In 2008 the Census Bureau began asking Americans in an annual survey whether they have been divorced in the last year, which is allowing researchers to start filling in gaps in state data. But so far there aren't enough data to identify trends.
"To do this kind of research requires a huge amount of persistence," says George Levinger, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts.
Still, the widespread circulation of the supposed Facebook divorce link shows how a catchy number can take on a life of its own.
The 1-in-5 number originated with an executive at an online divorce-service provider in the U.K. Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which allows Britons to file uncontested divorces at low cost, had just launched the company's Facebook page and wondered what role Facebook has in precipitating divorces. After determining that the word "Facebook" appeared in 989 of the company's 5,000 or so most recent divorce petitions, he had Divorce-Online issue a news release in December 2009 stating "Facebook is bad for your marriage."
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Mr. Keenan acknowledges that his company's clients aren't necessarily representative of all divorces, and he adds that his firm never claimed that Facebook actually causes 20% of divorces. "It was a very unscientific survey," Mr. Keenan says.
A few months later, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers announced results of a survey of its 1,600 members, 81% of whom said they had seen an increase in cases using social-networking "evidence" in the last five years. These results weren't surprising, given Facebook's phenomenal growth. But the survey drew widespread coverage that often resuscitated the 1-in-5 divorce figure.
The confusion crested last week when Perry Drake, senior manager of media relations for Loyola University Health System in Chicago, put together a news release touting a Loyola psychologist's expertise on relationships and social media. Finding the 1-in-5 figure online, Mr. Drake led the news release with the headline: "Don't let your marriage be among the 1 in 5 destroyed by Facebook." By the time Mr. Drake became aware of the error and alerted the news release's recipients, news articles had appeared around the world.
"A little sloppiness on my part has made for a bad two weeks," says Mr. Drake.
Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com
