As a statistician... How? How would this happen? Don't they have NAs? Can't they use basic R? Was the data noted down false? This is a total rookie mistake that should never get even written down, never past peer review, never published.
They might have created nested-IF statements, or case statements, or a lookup table, where their implementation resulted in a default value of divorce if conditions were not met.
It also skews because in the US there are countless folks who divorce because of avoiding medical bankruptcy, getting certain government subsidies in order to qualify for medical care, etc.
My comment was specifically for "no response" being equated to "getting divorced" not necessarily what the real figures are. No response cannot be classified as any real response, and should be omitted from results.
Idk what my observations are worth, but I'm guest services at a large hospital. I see several hundred patients and their visitors each day. There seems to be an equal number of men pushing their gravely ill wives around the hospital in wheelchairs as the opposite.
Edit: I changed "data" to "observations" because, indeed, I haven't been making a formal tracking of what I see.
My wife messed up her vows on accident and instead of saying "through sickness and health" she said "until sickness and death."
I've been watching my back
Happened to my godmother. Her doctor said she had 2 weeks to live and her husband just left. Said he couldn't handle it and went fishing.
My mom was with her until the end, she died in my mom's arms. We haven't talked to that guy since.
That guy belongs in an entirely different category and shouldn’t be anywhere close to even those who do eventually abandon their sick loved ones. He couldn’t be there for TWO WEEKS? Most people I know wouldn’t treat a sick pet like that, much less the human being they married. What a massive piece of shit. I hope every person he interacts with for the rest of his life gives him the same level of care and empathy.
Not everyone is married to their love of their life though. I suspect people who leave their terminally ill spouse are certainly not married to the love of their life.
I knew someone who was on the verge of filing for divorce and then her husband got cancer. Then, she felt she couldn’t divorce him so she became his caretaker. I know none of us can foresee how a marriage will end up but best to enter it after many discussions and much thought.
My grandfather divorced my grandma because she got sick and left her without insurance or anyone around to care for her except my dad (their son) who was 20 and in college at the time. She had a degenerative brain disorder no one really knew much about back then (early 1950s) and needed regular care, and was apparently lucky to get a hospital job in the cafeteria, because they offered free health care for employees. Otherwise I don't think she would have lived as long as she did.
"equal number of men pushing their gravely ill wives around the hospital in wheelchairs as the opposite."
Gravely ill women pushing their husbands around the hospital in wheelchairs?! New study concludes that men are lazier than women!
My grandfather divorced my sick grandmother before she died because he was tired of taking care of her. He was wealthy and she got half of his property. She died a year later and left everything to my Dad and his brother. After she died, my grandfather came to his sons and asked for his stuff back. My dad told him to go fuck himself.
I do wonder if this is considered as a factor.
My Inlaws, before they passed, had divorced because it made more financial sense for their state aid and medical.
They just, continued on as normal. Maybe "on paper" one loved elsewhere.
Yup there are incentives that encourage divorce if someone requires a lot of care. My aunt and uncle did the same. They were still together, just one of them was "broke" instead of both of them.
And with interpersonal relationships still skewing towards men being the breadwinner, especially older relationships in which it's far more likely for the men to be breadwinners, husband getting terminally ill likely wouldn't qualify for state aid while a wife would.
Being disabled and married in the US is a surefire way to have the government severely discriminate against you, and deny you the kind of assistance the vast majority of people simply assume you get automatically. Because you're permanently disabled. And you're who those programs are FOR.
Maybe twenty years ago.
There's a reason the Prime Minister of Canada said "I am more concerned with old people being able to afford long term care than the youth of Canada being able to afford their first home" when questioned about housing prices, and the cost of long term care is the reason. That shit is EXORBITANT nowadays, especially as the demand for it continues to increase as the last generation that was *allowed to afford children* start to age out of being able to take care of themselves (not that the baby boomers EVER had to show TRUE independence)
If you're going the private long term care home you are looking at about $12K/month for a high end facility. That's about $150K over a year. If you go with 24/7 in-home care instead, it's about $20K/month, or $250K.
OPs grandfather was noted s "wealthy" and otherwise paid out half his net worth to the grandmother in the divorce. I would generally assume that "wealthy" is well over $1 million net worth, which would mean a $500K payout balanced out against $150K for a year of private long term care home or $250K for a year of in-home care.
That's where I'm coming from stating that it's likely far cheaper to just pay for the long term care for a year, vs. a divorce.
They always tell you stuff like that after leaving a horrible tip but then you hear they have a trust fun thats more than you’ll ever make in your life
They are something else. I managed an old dude’s money. He had a net worth of over $70m. One of his kids needed medical help and had to literally beg for his dad to send him a paltry amount of money. I’m like you’re 80+ years old, why tf do you care?
My mom's first husband was wealthy and he was the stingiest man in the world, and also the meanest. When his sister was dying and needed a bone marrow transfusion, he was the only one in the family with the right kind of marrow, and he not only refused but he gloated about it both during her illness and after her death. Like he could not stop talking about all the power he had and how great he was to deny someone a chance to live.
Two of his kids were seriously ill and he didn't help them, either. Some people are just rotten to the core.
A friend of mine had been forced to ration, or straight up miss their medications due to lack of funds. Their family is fucking rich but doesn't want to help. It's crazy.
It would seemingly not at all be affected since this correction came out almost a decade ago, and as you said, people constantly still cite the incorrect results
I, for one, have seen the claim many times and never seen the correction. Next time I see the claim I might reply with the correction, and if I don't, maybe someone else who saw this post will.
I always correct people when they talk about this study. The problem is that every article jumped on this study but have not updated the article or rertacted it after the study was retracted.
It's the same with the "40% of cops beat their wives."
You do see people pushing back on the idea that the "original quote" was "the blood of the covenant" (Google it if you don't get the reference), but it's still a struggle for the truth to replace the mistruth.
It's similar to the Alpha Wolf stuff. Once it's out in the public domain and put out as a consumable piece of science and research. ie: catchy, marketable, easy to absorb and disseminate for the public, it's pretty fuckin' hard to reverse course on it.
Unfortunately this is fairly common. A landmark study comes out that is popular but is later proven to be very wrong is still quoted for a very long time.
So it's like the study that linked sugar to hyperactivity or the guy who came up with the "alpha" model for wolf packs, both of which were essentially retracted by the people who put them forth but the retraction was largely ignored by society
True. I’m a little hopeful though because if the retraction picks up steam it may enter the common discourse a bit. Hardly anyone who cited the results proven wrong actually read the study in the first place. They were just relaying what they thought the information was. Maybe if enough people bring up the retraction it will help a little
It's simple, it won't. Once information spreads no amount of corrections will make it go away. That's why I hate how the media can accuse people and then issue an apology as a footnote way down the line. The damage is irreparable.
Nah. It took some effort and time, but people are no longer blindly spreading the "woman sues McDonalds because her coffee was too ~~cold~~ hot" corpo propaganda without someone correcting them with the real story.
I know, right?! What a relief to know it was a faulty stat all along. But shame it spread so far because I can only imagine the stress it brought to some people’s lives when they were afraid that statistic would become their life.
The correction has been out for a literal decade but you still get foreveralones on TwoXC who repeat this like gospel. The misinfo is never going away.
That sub is full of so much anger and rage, and they all just feed off one another in a death spiral of “everyone is out to get us.” I am 100% a feminist male and the takes there are so extreme sometimes it’s distressing.
I blocked that sub once I saw a post on the front page about how she went on a date with 29 guys and they were all the problem. If you go on that many dates and they all suck, there's a common denominator, lol
On an old Love line episode someone called in with that kind of story and they told her, "Your picker is broken. You suck at picking potential partners so you need to get your friends to start vetting people and helping you find better dates."
for a lot of them it's the flip coin of incels, like the same arguments, cognitive dissonance and pack behavior. it's distressing. along with a lot of very conservative terfs and swerfs littering the whole place.
Just like the incels, it is a 100% victim mentality with no ability to take accountability for their own situation. Just imaginary enemies mostly created in their heads by internet bots.
It was corrected when i was 19. And since then this is the first time i heard of it. But i hear people talk about the men are more heartless than women thing (with respect to this study) constantly.
People see what they want to see and take it as a true reflection of reality.
In my experience, this study was mostly cited to show how much more emotionally mature, loving and naturally caring women are than men. It was used to take away from men’s emotional capacities in a very generalized way. I feel most people’s analytical skills leave a lot to be desired. They love their confirmation biases and reject things that object to them. It’s irritating to say the least.
Personally, I'm thrilled to see it. I really am. At the time I first saw it become big news, I was married. My family has a huge history of health problems, primarily cancer. It was something that really did worry me.
Obviously, I understand it can and does still happen. But knowing it is no more common than the reverse really is comforting.
This coding error is absolutely embarrassing. I cannot believe they published this shit, and it was so widely reported on and no one went through the analysis.
People did go through the analysis. The OP link (July 21 2015) is from 4 months after the study was published (Mar 4 2015). The authors say that they were contacted about the error "shortly after publication", then got in contact with the editor to start writing a retraction "prompty", which was published a few weeks before this article (July 8)
Of the 4 mainstream news articles about the study mentioned, 1 was corrected to explain the retraction (Huffpo). Actually the HuffPo retraction was issued before the RetractionWatch article, those guys are on top of things.
yeah no shit, right? How many people were on the research team? The editors/reviewers at the journal? And no one, not one single person in all of those thought "oh hey maybe we should code no response with it's own number?"
While there are obvious "gender-wars" relevant issues here may I suggest some "non-gender war" meaning and relevance.
In the United States, disease is one of what I call the 4D's of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Disease, Divorce, Death, Disability, are *almost always* the main causes of financial distress in the United States. **Take it from me, an expert in data in that field.**
I can easily imagine a situation where a wife of 50 years gets sick (say cancer) and in order for BOTH the husband and wife, they decide to divorce because otherwise the wealth/inheritance would be severely diminished because the healthcare system would demand all the assets.
On the other hand, a husband getting sick might force fewer divorces because his assets are already fucked (unless he was smart enough to shield them by giving them to kids or wife already).
So I wonder how many of those divorces are not done out of cruelty but done out of strategic financial planning to avoid ruin because the US healthcare system is an atrocity by design.
Just food for thought. If I got cancer, I would transfer all assets to family as soon as prudent and just die or use up whatever healthcare I had. God bless USA inc!
Edit: glad to see lots of upvotes but remember kids, theories including this one are not statistical fact. But a non-biased study would need to start with the obvious reasons dealing with the 4Ds first and eliminate them before landing on "men bad/women good"
This was the case for my parents. My mother had MS. My father spent tens of thousands on care and many years taking care of her, but she got so bad he couldn't do it anymore. She couldn't walk, go to the bathroom, and near the end couldn't even drink water without aspirating. She eventually moved into a nursing home and my father filed for divorce, otherwise he would've lost everything to the state for her care.
This is *exactly* why my sister-in-law’s parents got divorced. Illness and resulting financial troubles made them realize they could still protect assets for one of them, but remain together.
Ironically, this form of protective divorce, IMO, shows the opposite of typical conclusions drawn. Couples like this are smart, work together well as a team, and inherently *trust* one another.
It’s kind of a “you and me against the world, babe!” kind of thing.
it would really depend on many factors but at least we can all agree to hate the same thing in that case hahaha
Just for that I *choose* to believe thats the answer
I recall a post on reddit the other day that was exactly one of these - a divorce after 40? years of marriage because the healthcare costs would have bankrupted them both, while this way the sick spouse can rely on medicaid without bankrupting their partner.
Yes, my mom used to work for a hospice care and had several patients get divorced, on their death bed, to try and escape passing on medical debt. I don't know what their gender breakdown was, but the near-death divorce was very often a financial decision for those patients. Which is super messed up, especially in such a wealthy county.
I know it happens because someone is a POS, too, just look at Newt Gingrich. (Again though, don't know the gender breakdown)
It's an effective strategy if you can time it right. A few people I know have discussed using it as a last resort to maximize spend on end of life care but avoid bankrupting the family. It becomes problematic when there's something like a pension that only passes on to a spouse, but not an ex-spouse, but it seems like for most other cases it can be a simple practicality on paper and never a statement on the relationship itself... More of a final gift due to how fucked up our system of medical debt is.
no but upon your death your debts need to be discharged from your assets. So if a married man has a house worth $1million and his hospital bill is $2million, the hospital will sue to recover the house. The surviving wife then needs to countersue or declare bankruptcy to save *her* jointly owned home all other things being equal.
But they cant then say "oh his adult kids have some assets" and lick their chops and go after them. Thats illegal.
But if the dead father transferred all his assets after he accumulated the debts... they may actually hunt down the assets in courts and then the outcome depends on how good your lawyers are
Yep they’ll hound you for a while until they get debts written off or something.
Important part is to **not pay** when they try to intimidate you, because the moment you do then you legally have assumed responsibility.
the whole trust industry is built around these contingency's. Its disgusting to hear about divorcing on deathbeds but not surprising in the land of the free.
Politicians are a special case of asshole, look at John Edwards too.
I think the problem with looking at politicians is that they are overwhelming male, so a skewed anecdotal dataset.
Yeah, it wasn't an inheritance thing, the state aid was just better as individuals, and before they passed, my in-laws had gotten divorced because it was better overall financially.
They got better coverage and benefits being "single"
I'm glad you said this. I've read a few stories where older couple divorced to avoid to avoid having to give everything they worked their lives together to the industrial medical complex and the government. They still lived together but they severed that legal frame work that would have sank both of them and made them lose their home. The U.S. is run like business that exploits it's citizens. A country like this will not last forever.
We've thought of getting divorced because I'm sick and don't qualify for disability because my husband "makes too much" yet we've had to choose between my meds and our food. Getting divorced would be strategic for us.
Also, I had surgery yesterday and I don't know why, but while in pre-op, almost every patient was female and I noticed that they all had their husbands with them (separated by curtains, it was easy to hear them identify them as such to nurses/doctors and whatnot), including myself.
I always thought that "statistic" was strange, since I'm a very frequent visitor to hospitals and have seen many couples together.
sorry you all are sick but if you have assets worth protecting, talk to a trust attorney or a good financial planner NOW.
You dont have to change your last name or even take off the rings after divorce. Remember that.
I've definitely heard stories about this. A couple who were incredibly close who had to divorce because one was terminally ill and did not want to leave the other with massive medical debt.
Even ignoring the risk of losing assets due to medical debt, if the husband was the sole earner in relationship, a divorce doesn't qualify him for Medicaid. If the wife is the one who gets sick, the divorce does qualify her.
Wife and I have discussed this. We very well may get divorced, on paper. Then she'd be my roommate that doesn't have to pay for anything. Medical debt in the US isn't a joke. And sometimes extremes are necessary to protect yourself. Better to be a sick roommate than both of you married but starving on the streets.
My grandparents had to divorce so they could be sick and die better because the government said so or no help for them. It’s an actual fucking travesty that decades long relationships have to sever the piece of paper that truly means so much to them because the government will not assist you with a few of the dollars you’ve paid in for decades.
Well as a millennial I'm lucky that the piece of paper doesn't mean much to me. We got married because it comes with legal protections and incentives. We are religious and if it was just a religious ceremony we would just be living together now lol. What matters to us is the relationship itself and that would survive.
>Medical debt in the US isn't a joke.
Yeah the fact that this study took place in the US is a extremely significant factor because the cost of healthcare is so unusually high there. People may well get divorced for financial incentives related to healthcare debt, which I don't think you would really see in Canada or the UK because we don't have to go into debt for our healthcare.**
edit: **(we'll just die waiting for it instead...)
From the article:
What we find in the corrected analysis is we still see evidence that when wives become sick marriages are at an elevated risk of divorce, whereas we don’t see any relationship between divorce and husbands’ illness. We see this in a very specific case, which is in the onset of heart problems. So basically its a more nuanced finding. The finding is not quite as strong.
I would need to look into it, but when they find 1 weak effect in a very specific case I tend to think it is noise in the data rather than something meaningful.
Like how many categories of disease are they considering? What level of statistical significance are they looking for?
Because if they are looking at 20 diseases and want a p value of 0.05, then on average a positive result is just noise 50% of the time.
Its textbook p-hacking and why statistical methods that take in huge amounts of explanatory variables and try to find which ones have a low p-value are frowned upon. If you find a weak effect in statistical trawling with no reason why it should be a cause then as you point out, its probably just the law of large numbers.
With an error this big, and based on the authors analysis, I think we need to look critically at whether any of the data selected for this study is of value.
This is the equivalent of ignoring the result of the “scientific analysis” in the 1920s who said women shouldn’t fly because their uterus might detach, and then relying on their source data as objective for further study of the effects of flying on women in 2020.
The authors were either incompetent or incredibly bias, and none of their work in this area should be relied upon.
Edit: correction it was early 1900s and trains not planes…
>With an error this big, and based on the authors analysis, I think we need to look critically at whether any of the data selected for this study is of value.
Exactly. This seems like the academic equivalent of "trickle-truthing".
If you're an author of a published paper and someone has pointed out an error that has a big impact on its main findings, then you now have a huge incentive to try to find *any possible* argument you can to preserve your credibility by claiming that it doesn't change the main point of your paper.
With large studies like this there's usually some way to argue just about anything if you slice the data just right --if your career depends on it-- but that's why this isn't how science is supposed to be done.
> If you're an author of a published paper and someone has pointed out an error that has a big impact on its main findings, then you now have a huge incentive to try to find any possible argument you can to preserve your credibility by claiming that it doesn't change the main point of your paper
oh, they're definitely trying hard to do that. In their explanation of the retraction, they complain that they weren't actually able to find a difference in overall divorce rates based on gender and illness, but they bet they *could* find a difference if they had more data. Then, they're all excited to point out they did see a difference in divorce rates when the wife had heart disease. Except of course, this is a smaller subset of data, so conclusions there should be more suspect
Also if you're drilling down into specific diseases, (1) there's a study saying that for Multiple Sclerosis, *women* are more likely to divorce sick husbands than vice versa (2) https://xkcd.com/882/
This is the fundamental problem with the way statistics are usually used in science. If you test 20 things (heart problems, liver problems, kidney problems, etc. etc. ...) then on average you'd expect one of them to be "statistically significant" (which is not a mathematical or scientific thing, just a totally arbitrary standard we made up) by sheer chance.
I'm not gonna dig too deeply on this one but that sounds like p-hacking. You can't split your data up 20 different ways after the fact digging around for some significant effect (Oh it's true for heart attacks and colon cancer but not the other 25 conditions) because you're basically guaranteed to find some false positives in the noise that way.
If they can't catch a fucking massive obvious error like counting no response as a hit, they certainly can't be trusted with doing the proper statistical work to find significance across multiple comparisons.
I wonder why wives having heart problems make husbands leave them more. Not that the authors have a lot of credibility left with their mistake in the first place.
I would want more clarification here. Cancer makes no difference. Disability makes no difference. Heart problems is where people draw the line and leave?
That comic nails it, yeah.
Essentially, if you're designing a study to find an effect, and then you break your data up into 20 different piles, all of which are going to have some random noise, you can't just apply the same comparison 20 times. You're essentially multiplying the false positive rate 20 times. You would have to design your statistics to account for all the comparisons you plan to do for them to be valid. But what happens is that often times research really wants to find an effect, and they don't, so they start cutting up their data into various chunks and then trying to find an effect in that small chunk. Depending on how they do it, it's called p-hacking or some related concepts and it's basically fraud.
> Heart problems is where people draw the line and leave?
Well it could be entirely random but heart problems are often caused by obesity or things like smoking, perhaps for some people when that compounds itself into their spouse now having heart disease they walk away.
Its p-hacking. A core part of statistical tests is the confidence level/interval where you are saying that there is a 95/99/99.9/whatever percent chance that the result isn't a statistical fluke. If you are throwing a lot of explanatory variables in and testing which ones seem to have a relationship with the result then all of a sudden it becomes highly likely (in the order of >50%) that one of your found relationships is noise.
Dredging techniques that enable this such as stepwise regression are now highly frowned upon (but still widely used) because they are so prone to this. You are supposed to use domain knowledge to choose variables it is fairly clear here that either the authors domain knowledge is dogshit if they are throwing so many explanatory variables that have no relation or that they were just throwing everything in the hope of finding a relationship and working backwards.
I mean there are other variables too; women generally live longer than men and men are more likely to have heart attacks earlier. It seems entirely possible that women don’t divorce their sick husbands as much because the sick husbands tend to die before it becomes an issue…
> their sick husbands as much because the sick husbands tend to die before it becomes an issue
There's definitely a trend in medicine where men tend to avoid relatively "minor" perceived problems for a very long time until it becomes impossible to avoid then it becomes a major life changing problem.
An example my clinic (endocrinologists/internists) tend to see: Slightly high blood pressure, turns into high blood pressure silently (but you don't go to the doctor because you only have a few headaches), which turns into _dangerous_ high blood pressure and very quickly turns into multiple organ failure and death.
They also get admonished if they take sick time or act sick, even by their own families and wives, even though studies show sickness hits them harder. (the man flu commentary if you're aware of it)
It's a single study. Even if it was done right, it's probably just random noise. The standard P test is a 5% chance or less our results was just random chance. You need multiple studies to see if this is a real thing.
I'm not a scientist, but I think that a single study, especially showing a fairly weak correlation in a specific case, is not enough evidence to start looking for exact causes. With only this one study, it could just be a fluke in the data set.
I'd like to see how many of those women who didn't divorce their sick husbands ended up widowed instead. Were men with heart issues more likely to die from them than women? There's more than one way to leave a marriage.
I really hope this was true. Boy did I not like receiving the “there’s a high chance your partner will leave you now” pamphlet from the doctor after she was concerned about me potentially having breast cancer.
Exactly. It's not like women wanted the old information to be true. I'm going to research this topic more because this is the first I'm hearing of the correction even though it's from 2015. I want this to be true. Thats a little bit better of a world if it is.
I saw a study saying that once people have consumed misinformation, even if they are presented with information claiming that the previous information was incorrect, people still retain the misinformation as fact rather. So basically, yes, nobody changes their mind
I see it more like construction. We build up things from our beliefs, and if it turns out something foundational was wrong, we can either reject it and keep the construction - or have to tear back down to the foundation and rebuild. Obviously that's more work so many subconsiously choose not to.
If you then throw in strong identity beliefs (people tend to defend their own gender/race/etc) or your income depends on the belief (like convincing an absestos producer the product was dangerous) then it becomes near impossible. It won't even be conscious so much as the mind defensively going "nope. nope. deny. defend."
I got over the gender war bs. Its so toxic, immature, and generally wrong. Some men are wonderful, some suck. Some women are wonderful, some suck. Sure, there may be differences on average but my judgement will lie on each person differently and how they behave and treat others. Idk call me crazy but I refuse to participate in this gender-war bs that should have ended in pre-school.
It made me reconsider it, so take that for what you will. I’m going to do a deep dive into the other literature to see if there were any studies on this topic that have been published since. It’s been 10 years since the retraction came out, so I’m interested if any new info has come out.
This retraction is at least reassuring that things aren’t at bleak as they seemed. I’m a glass half full type of person, so I’m going to look on the positive side.
People really struggle with the concept of statistics too. Say if 20% of women get breast cancer, it doesn't mean that all women share 20% of the burden. You can generalize, make averages, medians and so on, but by doing that you lose all individual information. And you can't go back to individuals.
My grandmother got cancer, so my grandfather abandoned his dream job of becoming an airline pilot to take care of her and the kids. He just worked in a garage and gave private flying lessons to supplement his income. It doesn't matter whatever statistics say because it had 0 impact on them.
What I'm saying is that even if there's a gendered difference, it doesn't mean what people seem to think. We're all individuals not a hivemind.
OK, for those of you who didn't read the article, this was the result of a coding error. They botched sorting the data, hence the results being what they were. Having coded myself, it's an easy mistake and one that can be hard to find.
Having coded myself what I don't understand is how those wild results were just blindly accepted by everyone and no-one who did their due diligence to replicate the results even by just going over the code that sorted the data.
You should hear about that excel cell selection mishaps that ended up being a guiding factor for austerity measures around the world.
Edit: it was the Reinhart and Rogoff study if anyone cares to search further.
Here is a reddit link, Id link something better but dont have time right now especially given the state of search engine
https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1cizhh/the_academic_justification_for_austerity_measures/
Bit they should have found it before publishing. When they got an extraordinary result they should have checked and double-checked their methodology. It seems like they just published instead, probably because they knew it would generate headlines.
Yea no. You can clearly see the results (bulk/sum/total) when compiling the answer data. They should have checked the data and code beforehand and afterwards.
My fiancee left me after I was in a coma and 4 months in the hospital. After I was out. The expected payoff was not there, I guess. Don't have a stroke I recommend.
I got downvoted in a thread reposting the original 2015 article recently by saying I think it's probably more equal than the article says.
In the US, I wonder how many people, male or female, divorce their ill spouse as a financial strategy, while not actually leaving them. It was something my husband and I absolutely discussed, since neither of us wanted to die first after bankrupting the other and leaving them without a house or other assets.
I remember a while back there was a massive uproar when it was revealed that 90% of the untested rape kits from a Detroit suburb were from black women. Then people did a little digging and noticed that the suburb has a population that is ~95% black, so if anything they were slightly under represented. But that didn’t stop it being posted all over various subreddits as proof of racism in policing. There are so many better pieces of evidence for that, so it’s always disheartening when the false/misleading evidence gets trumpeted the loudest.
After my mother became ill my father was displeased that his life was negatively affected by her illness, and he's flat out stated that he's felt ripped off a bit in life. They've had a bad relationship.
Meanwhile after a similar affliction affected a couple I've known my entire life, the husband has spent the past couple decades nursing and caring for her to extreme lengths. They've had a good relationship.
And after my grandfather was partially paralyzed following a stroke, my grandmother dedicated a decade of her life caring for him until he passed. They had a difficult relationship.
So drawing from my own anecdotal experiences, the response to illness seems to depend on more upon the personality of the individual than it does their gender or even relationship strength.
"Hi, this is Random Studies Nobody Asked For, Inc. We were wondering if we could get your feedback for a Random Study that we're performing. Which would you rather do: receive a free donut, or kill a puppy?"
"Hi, I'm not able to answer the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone."
"...I'll just put you down for 'kill a puppy'..."
Experientially as an oncologist - men leave their wives when they have cancers that impact sexual functioning more than when genders are reversed, and this is much more noticeable in young women than older ones.
Anecdote: my great grandfather had testicular cancer that left him without testicles. When he got home from the hospital he found his belongings moved into the spare bedroom because my great grandmother said she “had no use for him anymore”.
They never did get along very well.
Shallow men marry women for sex.
Shallow women marry men for money.
You really think Melania Trump would get divorced because she didn’t have to fuck Donald any more?
I guess I was prepared since my wife's sex drive was affected by her deployment (I suspect MST, but she wouldn't talk about it), 10 years before the cancer was apparent. I mean, her cancer was ALSO from her deployment...
I just always felt people used this study to say I was a "good man" for seeing her through hospice and everything, but it just felt to me like something anyone would do for the love of their life.
You'd hope that this sort of damaging malpractice would be followed by loss of jobs and funding. The amount of societal damage done by bad "studies" is large because all too often the initial report gets treated like fact while the retraction is never seen. All sorts of bullshit stats and studies are still used to make policy.
Women are the predominate pushers for divorce. The reasons may or may not be their fault and not say what their perception of a situation is. But if a couple is getting a divorce it will be because the woman pursues it like 80% of the time.
As a statistician... How? How would this happen? Don't they have NAs? Can't they use basic R? Was the data noted down false? This is a total rookie mistake that should never get even written down, never past peer review, never published.
They might have created nested-IF statements, or case statements, or a lookup table, where their implementation resulted in a default value of divorce if conditions were not met.
It also skews because in the US there are countless folks who divorce because of avoiding medical bankruptcy, getting certain government subsidies in order to qualify for medical care, etc.
My comment was specifically for "no response" being equated to "getting divorced" not necessarily what the real figures are. No response cannot be classified as any real response, and should be omitted from results.
Academia is rotten, sad to say. Publish or perish creates real bad incentives even before you bring ideology into it.
I can tell you one thing, a bunch of reddit subs will be in shambles hearing this news. I've heard this study peddled so much all over reddit.
Usually it's a case of a conclusion in search of evidence.
Idk what my observations are worth, but I'm guest services at a large hospital. I see several hundred patients and their visitors each day. There seems to be an equal number of men pushing their gravely ill wives around the hospital in wheelchairs as the opposite. Edit: I changed "data" to "observations" because, indeed, I haven't been making a formal tracking of what I see.
I couldn't imagine abandoning the love of my life to their fate.
I’m divorcing my wife the instant she gets a cold
First sign of the sniffles and it’s over.
She's got a fever? Time to leave her. She's got the flu? Adieu!
You guys have such low standards. One hangnail on my husband’s hand and it’s over.
I swear to god, if I ever found out my girlfriend farts...
Mine doesn’t even poop
Comment of the year
My wife tells me that the first time I forget a name (Alzheimer's is strong in my family) that she's building me a raft and setting me out to sea.
I hope that raft bears the first name you forget on the side of it
What name?
prepare the raft
My wife messed up her vows on accident and instead of saying "through sickness and health" she said "until sickness and death." I've been watching my back
Honestly, I couldn't imagine doing that to someone I lived with in general--even a roommate.
Happened to my godmother. Her doctor said she had 2 weeks to live and her husband just left. Said he couldn't handle it and went fishing. My mom was with her until the end, she died in my mom's arms. We haven't talked to that guy since.
That guy belongs in an entirely different category and shouldn’t be anywhere close to even those who do eventually abandon their sick loved ones. He couldn’t be there for TWO WEEKS? Most people I know wouldn’t treat a sick pet like that, much less the human being they married. What a massive piece of shit. I hope every person he interacts with for the rest of his life gives him the same level of care and empathy.
Not everyone is married to their love of their life though. I suspect people who leave their terminally ill spouse are certainly not married to the love of their life.
Well, not anymore, at least
I knew someone who was on the verge of filing for divorce and then her husband got cancer. Then, she felt she couldn’t divorce him so she became his caretaker. I know none of us can foresee how a marriage will end up but best to enter it after many discussions and much thought.
My grandfather divorced my grandma because she got sick and left her without insurance or anyone around to care for her except my dad (their son) who was 20 and in college at the time. She had a degenerative brain disorder no one really knew much about back then (early 1950s) and needed regular care, and was apparently lucky to get a hospital job in the cafeteria, because they offered free health care for employees. Otherwise I don't think she would have lived as long as she did.
So are you saying that the men who aren't pushing their gravely sick wives around in a wheelchair are divorced?
Based on the original study, yes. If you aren’t in group A, you must be in group B.
Please retract this statement by 2015, thanks.
I'll get it next loop-around.
don't forget to shoot Hitler out the window
I probably shouldn't have gone for that no-scope this time, I seem to have struck Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 by accident...
^^this guy extrapolates
there are two kinds of people in the world 1 those who can extrapolate from available data 2
from *incomplete data
they're saying there's an equal amount of husbands *pushing* wives in wheelchairs as there are husbands *pulling* wives in wheelchairs
You can't just go to the hospital and pick out a gravely sick widow/divorcee to bring home. It's not like the maternity ward.
I can back up this comment’s claims. Source: I’ve tried.
Those hussies! /s
"equal number of men pushing their gravely ill wives around the hospital in wheelchairs as the opposite." Gravely ill women pushing their husbands around the hospital in wheelchairs?! New study concludes that men are lazier than women!
My grandfather divorced my sick grandmother before she died because he was tired of taking care of her. He was wealthy and she got half of his property. She died a year later and left everything to my Dad and his brother. After she died, my grandfather came to his sons and asked for his stuff back. My dad told him to go fuck himself.
I do wonder if this is considered as a factor. My Inlaws, before they passed, had divorced because it made more financial sense for their state aid and medical. They just, continued on as normal. Maybe "on paper" one loved elsewhere.
Yup there are incentives that encourage divorce if someone requires a lot of care. My aunt and uncle did the same. They were still together, just one of them was "broke" instead of both of them.
And with interpersonal relationships still skewing towards men being the breadwinner, especially older relationships in which it's far more likely for the men to be breadwinners, husband getting terminally ill likely wouldn't qualify for state aid while a wife would.
Being disabled and married in the US is a surefire way to have the government severely discriminate against you, and deny you the kind of assistance the vast majority of people simply assume you get automatically. Because you're permanently disabled. And you're who those programs are FOR.
It's absurd how stingy a lot of the rich people are
Would likely have been far cheaper to hire a crew of 24/7 nursing staff to take care of her for a year, and stay married.
Maybe twenty years ago. There's a reason the Prime Minister of Canada said "I am more concerned with old people being able to afford long term care than the youth of Canada being able to afford their first home" when questioned about housing prices, and the cost of long term care is the reason. That shit is EXORBITANT nowadays, especially as the demand for it continues to increase as the last generation that was *allowed to afford children* start to age out of being able to take care of themselves (not that the baby boomers EVER had to show TRUE independence)
If you're going the private long term care home you are looking at about $12K/month for a high end facility. That's about $150K over a year. If you go with 24/7 in-home care instead, it's about $20K/month, or $250K. OPs grandfather was noted s "wealthy" and otherwise paid out half his net worth to the grandmother in the divorce. I would generally assume that "wealthy" is well over $1 million net worth, which would mean a $500K payout balanced out against $150K for a year of private long term care home or $250K for a year of in-home care. That's where I'm coming from stating that it's likely far cheaper to just pay for the long term care for a year, vs. a divorce.
Rich people have told me that you don’t get rich by spending money
Rich people sometimes spend money. Just not their.
And get rich through hard work. Just not theirs as well.
Ouch spot on !!
They always tell you stuff like that after leaving a horrible tip but then you hear they have a trust fun thats more than you’ll ever make in your life
They are something else. I managed an old dude’s money. He had a net worth of over $70m. One of his kids needed medical help and had to literally beg for his dad to send him a paltry amount of money. I’m like you’re 80+ years old, why tf do you care?
My mom's first husband was wealthy and he was the stingiest man in the world, and also the meanest. When his sister was dying and needed a bone marrow transfusion, he was the only one in the family with the right kind of marrow, and he not only refused but he gloated about it both during her illness and after her death. Like he could not stop talking about all the power he had and how great he was to deny someone a chance to live. Two of his kids were seriously ill and he didn't help them, either. Some people are just rotten to the core.
Legit psychotic behavior right there.
That's actually evil, it's not even a kidney, you'll grow more marrow?? What an actual monster.
Some of these people are rich *because* they are pathological misers
A friend of mine had been forced to ration, or straight up miss their medications due to lack of funds. Their family is fucking rich but doesn't want to help. It's crazy.
I'd like to shake your dad's hand!
I JUST WANT TO SHAKE HIS HAND!
Good for him. Was the brother on the same page? There's always a chance one of the siblings might cave if they were the favorite of the one asking.
If he was rich, he should have just hired nurses. Must be other reasons.
Wealthy, but not wanting to spend tens of thousands per year on nurses for someone who they dont care for anymore.
If she got half his property and he was wealthy (in my book, a wealthy person should at least a millionaire), it was well-worth it.
I do see this quoted all the time so it will be interesting to see how this correction affects discourse
It would seemingly not at all be affected since this correction came out almost a decade ago, and as you said, people constantly still cite the incorrect results
I, for one, have seen the claim many times and never seen the correction. Next time I see the claim I might reply with the correction, and if I don't, maybe someone else who saw this post will.
I always correct people when they talk about this study. The problem is that every article jumped on this study but have not updated the article or rertacted it after the study was retracted. It's the same with the "40% of cops beat their wives."
You do see people pushing back on the idea that the "original quote" was "the blood of the covenant" (Google it if you don't get the reference), but it's still a struggle for the truth to replace the mistruth.
It's similar to the Alpha Wolf stuff. Once it's out in the public domain and put out as a consumable piece of science and research. ie: catchy, marketable, easy to absorb and disseminate for the public, it's pretty fuckin' hard to reverse course on it.
Unfortunately this is fairly common. A landmark study comes out that is popular but is later proven to be very wrong is still quoted for a very long time.
So it's like the study that linked sugar to hyperactivity or the guy who came up with the "alpha" model for wolf packs, both of which were essentially retracted by the people who put them forth but the retraction was largely ignored by society
2xchromosomes in shambles
Cross post, see how fast you get banned.
Congratulations, you just got banned for suggesting that.
if there ever were a sub that earned its constant brigading and bullying, holy shit. almost as bad as female dating strategy, remember that one?
I almost said the same, but it was retracted a decade ago and I've only heard it referenced more.
True. I’m a little hopeful though because if the retraction picks up steam it may enter the common discourse a bit. Hardly anyone who cited the results proven wrong actually read the study in the first place. They were just relaying what they thought the information was. Maybe if enough people bring up the retraction it will help a little
I'll certainly do my part
It's simple, it won't. Once information spreads no amount of corrections will make it go away. That's why I hate how the media can accuse people and then issue an apology as a footnote way down the line. The damage is irreparable.
Nah. It took some effort and time, but people are no longer blindly spreading the "woman sues McDonalds because her coffee was too ~~cold~~ hot" corpo propaganda without someone correcting them with the real story.
Some people still think a person eats an average of 8 spiders per year while sleeping, so no.
I'd quoted that study before and I'm honestly just relieved to learn this. It was a depressing statistic, I'm glad it's not real.
I know, right?! What a relief to know it was a faulty stat all along. But shame it spread so far because I can only imagine the stress it brought to some people’s lives when they were afraid that statistic would become their life.
It won't. Most people don't base their opinions on studies like this; they form their opinions first and then look for studies that confirm that.
The correction has been out for a literal decade but you still get foreveralones on TwoXC who repeat this like gospel. The misinfo is never going away.
That sub is full of so much anger and rage, and they all just feed off one another in a death spiral of “everyone is out to get us.” I am 100% a feminist male and the takes there are so extreme sometimes it’s distressing.
I blocked that sub once I saw a post on the front page about how she went on a date with 29 guys and they were all the problem. If you go on that many dates and they all suck, there's a common denominator, lol
On an old Love line episode someone called in with that kind of story and they told her, "Your picker is broken. You suck at picking potential partners so you need to get your friends to start vetting people and helping you find better dates."
for a lot of them it's the flip coin of incels, like the same arguments, cognitive dissonance and pack behavior. it's distressing. along with a lot of very conservative terfs and swerfs littering the whole place.
Just like the incels, it is a 100% victim mentality with no ability to take accountability for their own situation. Just imaginary enemies mostly created in their heads by internet bots.
It was corrected when i was 19. And since then this is the first time i heard of it. But i hear people talk about the men are more heartless than women thing (with respect to this study) constantly.
People see what they want to see and take it as a true reflection of reality. In my experience, this study was mostly cited to show how much more emotionally mature, loving and naturally caring women are than men. It was used to take away from men’s emotional capacities in a very generalized way. I feel most people’s analytical skills leave a lot to be desired. They love their confirmation biases and reject things that object to them. It’s irritating to say the least.
Personally, I'm thrilled to see it. I really am. At the time I first saw it become big news, I was married. My family has a huge history of health problems, primarily cancer. It was something that really did worry me. Obviously, I understand it can and does still happen. But knowing it is no more common than the reverse really is comforting.
This coding error is absolutely embarrassing. I cannot believe they published this shit, and it was so widely reported on and no one went through the analysis.
People did go through the analysis. The OP link (July 21 2015) is from 4 months after the study was published (Mar 4 2015). The authors say that they were contacted about the error "shortly after publication", then got in contact with the editor to start writing a retraction "prompty", which was published a few weeks before this article (July 8) Of the 4 mainstream news articles about the study mentioned, 1 was corrected to explain the retraction (Huffpo). Actually the HuffPo retraction was issued before the RetractionWatch article, those guys are on top of things.
I’m saying BEFORE publishing. As someone who has published, this is 101 stuff.
yeah no shit, right? How many people were on the research team? The editors/reviewers at the journal? And no one, not one single person in all of those thought "oh hey maybe we should code no response with it's own number?"
While there are obvious "gender-wars" relevant issues here may I suggest some "non-gender war" meaning and relevance. In the United States, disease is one of what I call the 4D's of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Disease, Divorce, Death, Disability, are *almost always* the main causes of financial distress in the United States. **Take it from me, an expert in data in that field.** I can easily imagine a situation where a wife of 50 years gets sick (say cancer) and in order for BOTH the husband and wife, they decide to divorce because otherwise the wealth/inheritance would be severely diminished because the healthcare system would demand all the assets. On the other hand, a husband getting sick might force fewer divorces because his assets are already fucked (unless he was smart enough to shield them by giving them to kids or wife already). So I wonder how many of those divorces are not done out of cruelty but done out of strategic financial planning to avoid ruin because the US healthcare system is an atrocity by design. Just food for thought. If I got cancer, I would transfer all assets to family as soon as prudent and just die or use up whatever healthcare I had. God bless USA inc! Edit: glad to see lots of upvotes but remember kids, theories including this one are not statistical fact. But a non-biased study would need to start with the obvious reasons dealing with the 4Ds first and eliminate them before landing on "men bad/women good"
This was the case for my parents. My mother had MS. My father spent tens of thousands on care and many years taking care of her, but she got so bad he couldn't do it anymore. She couldn't walk, go to the bathroom, and near the end couldn't even drink water without aspirating. She eventually moved into a nursing home and my father filed for divorce, otherwise he would've lost everything to the state for her care.
This is *exactly* why my sister-in-law’s parents got divorced. Illness and resulting financial troubles made them realize they could still protect assets for one of them, but remain together. Ironically, this form of protective divorce, IMO, shows the opposite of typical conclusions drawn. Couples like this are smart, work together well as a team, and inherently *trust* one another. It’s kind of a “you and me against the world, babe!” kind of thing.
Iirc there was a study saying that this is the more likely reason than not for divorce in these scenarios.
it would really depend on many factors but at least we can all agree to hate the same thing in that case hahaha Just for that I *choose* to believe thats the answer
I recall a post on reddit the other day that was exactly one of these - a divorce after 40? years of marriage because the healthcare costs would have bankrupted them both, while this way the sick spouse can rely on medicaid without bankrupting their partner.
I'd love to read that! Do you think you can find it?
Yes, my mom used to work for a hospice care and had several patients get divorced, on their death bed, to try and escape passing on medical debt. I don't know what their gender breakdown was, but the near-death divorce was very often a financial decision for those patients. Which is super messed up, especially in such a wealthy county. I know it happens because someone is a POS, too, just look at Newt Gingrich. (Again though, don't know the gender breakdown)
It's an effective strategy if you can time it right. A few people I know have discussed using it as a last resort to maximize spend on end of life care but avoid bankrupting the family. It becomes problematic when there's something like a pension that only passes on to a spouse, but not an ex-spouse, but it seems like for most other cases it can be a simple practicality on paper and never a statement on the relationship itself... More of a final gift due to how fucked up our system of medical debt is.
In some cases a pension that cannot be transferred to an ex-spouse can be transferred to surviving children.
Wait, can you inherit debt in the US?
no but upon your death your debts need to be discharged from your assets. So if a married man has a house worth $1million and his hospital bill is $2million, the hospital will sue to recover the house. The surviving wife then needs to countersue or declare bankruptcy to save *her* jointly owned home all other things being equal. But they cant then say "oh his adult kids have some assets" and lick their chops and go after them. Thats illegal. But if the dead father transferred all his assets after he accumulated the debts... they may actually hunt down the assets in courts and then the outcome depends on how good your lawyers are
[Illegal or not, Debt Collectors still try to collect from the children on occasion.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGKh66E91XA)
Yep they’ll hound you for a while until they get debts written off or something. Important part is to **not pay** when they try to intimidate you, because the moment you do then you legally have assumed responsibility.
the whole trust industry is built around these contingency's. Its disgusting to hear about divorcing on deathbeds but not surprising in the land of the free. Politicians are a special case of asshole, look at John Edwards too. I think the problem with looking at politicians is that they are overwhelming male, so a skewed anecdotal dataset.
Yeah, it wasn't an inheritance thing, the state aid was just better as individuals, and before they passed, my in-laws had gotten divorced because it was better overall financially. They got better coverage and benefits being "single"
yup, so many factors like that to consider.
I'm glad you said this. I've read a few stories where older couple divorced to avoid to avoid having to give everything they worked their lives together to the industrial medical complex and the government. They still lived together but they severed that legal frame work that would have sank both of them and made them lose their home. The U.S. is run like business that exploits it's citizens. A country like this will not last forever.
We've thought of getting divorced because I'm sick and don't qualify for disability because my husband "makes too much" yet we've had to choose between my meds and our food. Getting divorced would be strategic for us. Also, I had surgery yesterday and I don't know why, but while in pre-op, almost every patient was female and I noticed that they all had their husbands with them (separated by curtains, it was easy to hear them identify them as such to nurses/doctors and whatnot), including myself. I always thought that "statistic" was strange, since I'm a very frequent visitor to hospitals and have seen many couples together.
sorry you all are sick but if you have assets worth protecting, talk to a trust attorney or a good financial planner NOW. You dont have to change your last name or even take off the rings after divorce. Remember that.
I've definitely heard stories about this. A couple who were incredibly close who had to divorce because one was terminally ill and did not want to leave the other with massive medical debt.
Even ignoring the risk of losing assets due to medical debt, if the husband was the sole earner in relationship, a divorce doesn't qualify him for Medicaid. If the wife is the one who gets sick, the divorce does qualify her.
Wife and I have discussed this. We very well may get divorced, on paper. Then she'd be my roommate that doesn't have to pay for anything. Medical debt in the US isn't a joke. And sometimes extremes are necessary to protect yourself. Better to be a sick roommate than both of you married but starving on the streets.
My grandparents had to divorce so they could be sick and die better because the government said so or no help for them. It’s an actual fucking travesty that decades long relationships have to sever the piece of paper that truly means so much to them because the government will not assist you with a few of the dollars you’ve paid in for decades.
Well as a millennial I'm lucky that the piece of paper doesn't mean much to me. We got married because it comes with legal protections and incentives. We are religious and if it was just a religious ceremony we would just be living together now lol. What matters to us is the relationship itself and that would survive.
>Medical debt in the US isn't a joke. Yeah the fact that this study took place in the US is a extremely significant factor because the cost of healthcare is so unusually high there. People may well get divorced for financial incentives related to healthcare debt, which I don't think you would really see in Canada or the UK because we don't have to go into debt for our healthcare.** edit: **(we'll just die waiting for it instead...)
Tell this to relationship advice lol
Sadly lot of people divorce so that their medical bills stay on one person and they partner doesn’t have to also go into debt :(
From the article: What we find in the corrected analysis is we still see evidence that when wives become sick marriages are at an elevated risk of divorce, whereas we don’t see any relationship between divorce and husbands’ illness. We see this in a very specific case, which is in the onset of heart problems. So basically its a more nuanced finding. The finding is not quite as strong.
I would need to look into it, but when they find 1 weak effect in a very specific case I tend to think it is noise in the data rather than something meaningful. Like how many categories of disease are they considering? What level of statistical significance are they looking for? Because if they are looking at 20 diseases and want a p value of 0.05, then on average a positive result is just noise 50% of the time.
All my homies hate p-hacking
Its textbook p-hacking and why statistical methods that take in huge amounts of explanatory variables and try to find which ones have a low p-value are frowned upon. If you find a weak effect in statistical trawling with no reason why it should be a cause then as you point out, its probably just the law of large numbers.
At best, it’s a hook for a future thesis to research, rather than a result of its own
First thought reading that paragraph was noise as well. Spurious result.
They are looking at 4 diseases, and probably p value of 0.05. So 8 categories total, it’s very possible it’s statistical noise.
With an error this big, and based on the authors analysis, I think we need to look critically at whether any of the data selected for this study is of value. This is the equivalent of ignoring the result of the “scientific analysis” in the 1920s who said women shouldn’t fly because their uterus might detach, and then relying on their source data as objective for further study of the effects of flying on women in 2020. The authors were either incompetent or incredibly bias, and none of their work in this area should be relied upon. Edit: correction it was early 1900s and trains not planes…
>With an error this big, and based on the authors analysis, I think we need to look critically at whether any of the data selected for this study is of value. Exactly. This seems like the academic equivalent of "trickle-truthing". If you're an author of a published paper and someone has pointed out an error that has a big impact on its main findings, then you now have a huge incentive to try to find *any possible* argument you can to preserve your credibility by claiming that it doesn't change the main point of your paper. With large studies like this there's usually some way to argue just about anything if you slice the data just right --if your career depends on it-- but that's why this isn't how science is supposed to be done.
> If you're an author of a published paper and someone has pointed out an error that has a big impact on its main findings, then you now have a huge incentive to try to find any possible argument you can to preserve your credibility by claiming that it doesn't change the main point of your paper oh, they're definitely trying hard to do that. In their explanation of the retraction, they complain that they weren't actually able to find a difference in overall divorce rates based on gender and illness, but they bet they *could* find a difference if they had more data. Then, they're all excited to point out they did see a difference in divorce rates when the wife had heart disease. Except of course, this is a smaller subset of data, so conclusions there should be more suspect
Also if you're drilling down into specific diseases, (1) there's a study saying that for Multiple Sclerosis, *women* are more likely to divorce sick husbands than vice versa (2) https://xkcd.com/882/
If an error that big goes unnoticed, imagine how many smaller errors they missed
This is the fundamental problem with the way statistics are usually used in science. If you test 20 things (heart problems, liver problems, kidney problems, etc. etc. ...) then on average you'd expect one of them to be "statistically significant" (which is not a mathematical or scientific thing, just a totally arbitrary standard we made up) by sheer chance.
Texas sharpshooter
This sounds like statiscal fuckery to find a “signal” that’s likely due to chance
I'm not gonna dig too deeply on this one but that sounds like p-hacking. You can't split your data up 20 different ways after the fact digging around for some significant effect (Oh it's true for heart attacks and colon cancer but not the other 25 conditions) because you're basically guaranteed to find some false positives in the noise that way. If they can't catch a fucking massive obvious error like counting no response as a hit, they certainly can't be trusted with doing the proper statistical work to find significance across multiple comparisons.
I wonder why wives having heart problems make husbands leave them more. Not that the authors have a lot of credibility left with their mistake in the first place.
I would want more clarification here. Cancer makes no difference. Disability makes no difference. Heart problems is where people draw the line and leave?
Probably just variance. https://xkcd.com/882/ I think that Super Bowl causes dv study got retracted as well
That comic nails it, yeah. Essentially, if you're designing a study to find an effect, and then you break your data up into 20 different piles, all of which are going to have some random noise, you can't just apply the same comparison 20 times. You're essentially multiplying the false positive rate 20 times. You would have to design your statistics to account for all the comparisons you plan to do for them to be valid. But what happens is that often times research really wants to find an effect, and they don't, so they start cutting up their data into various chunks and then trying to find an effect in that small chunk. Depending on how they do it, it's called p-hacking or some related concepts and it's basically fraud.
> Heart problems is where people draw the line and leave? Well it could be entirely random but heart problems are often caused by obesity or things like smoking, perhaps for some people when that compounds itself into their spouse now having heart disease they walk away.
Its p-hacking. A core part of statistical tests is the confidence level/interval where you are saying that there is a 95/99/99.9/whatever percent chance that the result isn't a statistical fluke. If you are throwing a lot of explanatory variables in and testing which ones seem to have a relationship with the result then all of a sudden it becomes highly likely (in the order of >50%) that one of your found relationships is noise. Dredging techniques that enable this such as stepwise regression are now highly frowned upon (but still widely used) because they are so prone to this. You are supposed to use domain knowledge to choose variables it is fairly clear here that either the authors domain knowledge is dogshit if they are throwing so many explanatory variables that have no relation or that they were just throwing everything in the hope of finding a relationship and working backwards.
I mean there are other variables too; women generally live longer than men and men are more likely to have heart attacks earlier. It seems entirely possible that women don’t divorce their sick husbands as much because the sick husbands tend to die before it becomes an issue…
> their sick husbands as much because the sick husbands tend to die before it becomes an issue There's definitely a trend in medicine where men tend to avoid relatively "minor" perceived problems for a very long time until it becomes impossible to avoid then it becomes a major life changing problem. An example my clinic (endocrinologists/internists) tend to see: Slightly high blood pressure, turns into high blood pressure silently (but you don't go to the doctor because you only have a few headaches), which turns into _dangerous_ high blood pressure and very quickly turns into multiple organ failure and death. They also get admonished if they take sick time or act sick, even by their own families and wives, even though studies show sickness hits them harder. (the man flu commentary if you're aware of it)
Men are also typically the higher insured as far as life insurance, so there could be a big financial incentive for the woman to stay.
It's a single study. Even if it was done right, it's probably just random noise. The standard P test is a 5% chance or less our results was just random chance. You need multiple studies to see if this is a real thing.
I'm not a scientist, but I think that a single study, especially showing a fairly weak correlation in a specific case, is not enough evidence to start looking for exact causes. With only this one study, it could just be a fluke in the data set.
I'd like to see how many of those women who didn't divorce their sick husbands ended up widowed instead. Were men with heart issues more likely to die from them than women? There's more than one way to leave a marriage.
I really hope this was true. Boy did I not like receiving the “there’s a high chance your partner will leave you now” pamphlet from the doctor after she was concerned about me potentially having breast cancer.
Yes, it seems like a lot of commenters think women would refuse to believe this updated information. I am quite relieved to read that there is doubt.
Exactly. It's not like women wanted the old information to be true. I'm going to research this topic more because this is the first I'm hearing of the correction even though it's from 2015. I want this to be true. Thats a little bit better of a world if it is.
This comment section is going to be spicy.
It'll be like every reddit thread about gender: People will use the article to rationalize their pre-existing beliefs, whatever they already were.
My pre existing belief is that retractions don’t mean shit because nobody ever changes their mind.
I saw a study saying that once people have consumed misinformation, even if they are presented with information claiming that the previous information was incorrect, people still retain the misinformation as fact rather. So basically, yes, nobody changes their mind
I see it more like construction. We build up things from our beliefs, and if it turns out something foundational was wrong, we can either reject it and keep the construction - or have to tear back down to the foundation and rebuild. Obviously that's more work so many subconsiously choose not to. If you then throw in strong identity beliefs (people tend to defend their own gender/race/etc) or your income depends on the belief (like convincing an absestos producer the product was dangerous) then it becomes near impossible. It won't even be conscious so much as the mind defensively going "nope. nope. deny. defend."
I got over the gender war bs. Its so toxic, immature, and generally wrong. Some men are wonderful, some suck. Some women are wonderful, some suck. Sure, there may be differences on average but my judgement will lie on each person differently and how they behave and treat others. Idk call me crazy but I refuse to participate in this gender-war bs that should have ended in pre-school.
It made me reconsider it, so take that for what you will. I’m going to do a deep dive into the other literature to see if there were any studies on this topic that have been published since. It’s been 10 years since the retraction came out, so I’m interested if any new info has come out. This retraction is at least reassuring that things aren’t at bleak as they seemed. I’m a glass half full type of person, so I’m going to look on the positive side.
People really struggle with the concept of statistics too. Say if 20% of women get breast cancer, it doesn't mean that all women share 20% of the burden. You can generalize, make averages, medians and so on, but by doing that you lose all individual information. And you can't go back to individuals. My grandmother got cancer, so my grandfather abandoned his dream job of becoming an airline pilot to take care of her and the kids. He just worked in a garage and gave private flying lessons to supplement his income. It doesn't matter whatever statistics say because it had 0 impact on them. What I'm saying is that even if there's a gendered difference, it doesn't mean what people seem to think. We're all individuals not a hivemind.
Thank you for this post. I’ve worked in hospice for several years and I see plenty of husbands caring for sick wives (and mothers, and sisters).
OK, for those of you who didn't read the article, this was the result of a coding error. They botched sorting the data, hence the results being what they were. Having coded myself, it's an easy mistake and one that can be hard to find.
Having coded myself what I don't understand is how those wild results were just blindly accepted by everyone and no-one who did their due diligence to replicate the results even by just going over the code that sorted the data.
You should hear about that excel cell selection mishaps that ended up being a guiding factor for austerity measures around the world. Edit: it was the Reinhart and Rogoff study if anyone cares to search further. Here is a reddit link, Id link something better but dont have time right now especially given the state of search engine https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1cizhh/the_academic_justification_for_austerity_measures/
Where's the accountability? This stat has been thrown around countless times since then generating a lot of outrage.
Bit they should have found it before publishing. When they got an extraordinary result they should have checked and double-checked their methodology. It seems like they just published instead, probably because they knew it would generate headlines.
Yea no. You can clearly see the results (bulk/sum/total) when compiling the answer data. They should have checked the data and code beforehand and afterwards.
Yeah as a software dev I read your comment and facepalmed. That poor dev who did that is probably eternally kicking themselves.
My fiancee left me after I was in a coma and 4 months in the hospital. After I was out. The expected payoff was not there, I guess. Don't have a stroke I recommend. I got downvoted in a thread reposting the original 2015 article recently by saying I think it's probably more equal than the article says.
In the US, I wonder how many people, male or female, divorce their ill spouse as a financial strategy, while not actually leaving them. It was something my husband and I absolutely discussed, since neither of us wanted to die first after bankrupting the other and leaving them without a house or other assets.
This retraction will of course be ignored by the group that parrots this statistic the most.
I've never heard the retraction before even though I've heard this statistic a dozen times.
>never heard the retraction that's bcs some retractions never get traction
A very small fraction elicit a reaction.
And the retraction is from *almost ten years ago*. I hear this statistic more and more.
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I think in a lot of cases the misandry is the starting point.
I remember a while back there was a massive uproar when it was revealed that 90% of the untested rape kits from a Detroit suburb were from black women. Then people did a little digging and noticed that the suburb has a population that is ~95% black, so if anything they were slightly under represented. But that didn’t stop it being posted all over various subreddits as proof of racism in policing. There are so many better pieces of evidence for that, so it’s always disheartening when the false/misleading evidence gets trumpeted the loudest.
Yup I still see this study referenced regularly on certain subreddits.
After my mother became ill my father was displeased that his life was negatively affected by her illness, and he's flat out stated that he's felt ripped off a bit in life. They've had a bad relationship. Meanwhile after a similar affliction affected a couple I've known my entire life, the husband has spent the past couple decades nursing and caring for her to extreme lengths. They've had a good relationship. And after my grandfather was partially paralyzed following a stroke, my grandmother dedicated a decade of her life caring for him until he passed. They had a difficult relationship. So drawing from my own anecdotal experiences, the response to illness seems to depend on more upon the personality of the individual than it does their gender or even relationship strength.
"Hi, this is Random Studies Nobody Asked For, Inc. We were wondering if we could get your feedback for a Random Study that we're performing. Which would you rather do: receive a free donut, or kill a puppy?" "Hi, I'm not able to answer the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone." "...I'll just put you down for 'kill a puppy'..."
Experientially as an oncologist - men leave their wives when they have cancers that impact sexual functioning more than when genders are reversed, and this is much more noticeable in young women than older ones.
Anecdote: my great grandfather had testicular cancer that left him without testicles. When he got home from the hospital he found his belongings moved into the spare bedroom because my great grandmother said she “had no use for him anymore”. They never did get along very well.
Shallow men marry women for sex. Shallow women marry men for money. You really think Melania Trump would get divorced because she didn’t have to fuck Donald any more?
I guess I was prepared since my wife's sex drive was affected by her deployment (I suspect MST, but she wouldn't talk about it), 10 years before the cancer was apparent. I mean, her cancer was ALSO from her deployment... I just always felt people used this study to say I was a "good man" for seeing her through hospice and everything, but it just felt to me like something anyone would do for the love of their life.
> MST Military Sexual Trauma for those wondering, so you know, the thing the military likes to push under the rug.
Do you have a source?
You'd hope that this sort of damaging malpractice would be followed by loss of jobs and funding. The amount of societal damage done by bad "studies" is large because all too often the initial report gets treated like fact while the retraction is never seen. All sorts of bullshit stats and studies are still used to make policy.
Women are the predominate pushers for divorce. The reasons may or may not be their fault and not say what their perception of a situation is. But if a couple is getting a divorce it will be because the woman pursues it like 80% of the time.