couples

That infidelity-and-income study? Don’t believe it.

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A recent study, presented at an American Sociological Association conference to a fawning media reception (NPR / Salon), tells us that men who make less than their wives or live-in girlfriends are five times more likely to cheat. It’s bogus. Here’s why.

While commentators have been stumbling over themselves to determine what the study’s findings mean about gender, marriage, and society, no one seems to be bothering to notice that the study itself appears pretty useless. The major conclusion, linking income and infidelity, has a number of problems, not the least of which is that everyone — myself included — who wasn’t at the conference is relying on a press release and subsequent media reports about it. Such reports are notoriously unreliable, often drawing ideas from generous and/or speculative interpretations of the results rather than the study itself. That said, here are three of the reasons I’m particularly skeptical:

  1. Do the math. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, upon which the study is based, followed about 9,000 individuals — surely a healthy sample size. But the infidelity study examined only those who were married or with a live-in partner for more than a year, which is a much smaller subset. And of those, only seven percent of men and three percent of women actually fessed up to cheating during the study’s six-year period. So, let’s be generous and say that two-thirds of the NLSY group met the relationship-status criteria (n=6,000). And we’ll presume that roughly half are of each gender (3,000 men and 3,000 women). That leaves us with about 210 men who have fessed up to infidelity in this survey. Of those, it is not clear from the media reports how many were in situations where the male earned less than his partner; other recent research suggests about a third, or fewer than 80 of those reporting infidelity, were in such a relationship. And remember, we’re being generous because we do not have the actual numbers. To be sure, 210 male cheaters is still a decent sample, and it could be enough to draw meaningful conclusions about links between infidelity and income (among other factors). But it still is not a lot. In fact, it probably is a lot less than the number of participants in the survey who actually cheated. Remember…
     
    Updated 2010-08-20: LiveScience.com (which has more details on the methodology, and as an added bonus, commentary from Stephanie Coontz) is reporting that only 3.8 percent of men, and 1.4 percent of women, admitted to cheating in the study. That’s not exactly true; on average, 3.8 percent of men and 1.4 percent of women admitted to cheating in any given year of the six-year study, at least according to the press release.

  2. …People lie. A major income discrepancy in the relationship may be a good reason for men to simply be more honest about their cheating. Sure, you could argue, if the wife/girlfriend finds out then the gravy train ends. But if the man is in a relationship for the money, and not emotionally committed, why on earth would he lie to an anonymous survey about his cheating? There is little incentive to, and there is no cognitive dissonance to resolve over telling the truth. On the other hand, if he is emotionally engaged, and is in the relationship for reasons other than money, he may find it safer (and more palatable) to hide any previous infidelity. If all that sounds awfully speculative, well, that’s the point. People lie on studies like this, and we do not always know who will be most likely to lie or why. Yet commenters (and, too often, the researchers themselves, as seems to be the case here) treat the findings as truth in spite of their huge flaws, and then seek to divine an explanation.

  3. Account for other factors, like age, education, and religion, and the income-infidelity link vanishes. That inconvenient fact is actually in the press release, but of course, no one is paying attention to it. Does earning more than your man make him more likely to cheat? the chatterers are asking. In a word, no — the income issue appears to (at best, and even this has big holes) correlate with, but not be a cause for, cheating.

The trouble with any study of undesirable behavior that relies on self-reports is that it is impossible to know what we’re really studying — the behavior itself, or the act of reporting it. Only a more carefully (and expensively) constructed study could parse that out. In the meantime, move on. Nothing new to see here.

From the AAMFT Research Conference: The one question that can improve depression treatment outcomes

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A large number of clients who seek treatment for depression also are having difficulty in their marriages. New data suggests that one question can dramatically improve patient outcomes on both problems: Which came first?

That’s the finding Steven Beach, a professor at the University of Georgia, discussed at this weekend’s AAMFT Research Conference in Alexandria, VA. Research has shown for many years (1, 2) that marital satisfaction and depression can be greatly improved at the same time through couples treatment, regardless of which problem came first. However, new data from Beach and his colleagues suggests that when women are struggling with both depression and marital problems, individual therapy for depression will have negative effects on the relationship if the marital discord came first — suggesting worse outcomes for the depression as well.

Why should this matter to MFTs, who are eminently qualified to identify and treat both issues? Because most depressed people don’t start by seeking treatment from a family therapist. According to a 2009 NAMI survey on depression, people with depression usually receive treatment from their primary care physicians. Just 38% receive their primary depression treatment through a mental health professional of any kind. Physicians tend to treat depression with medication and/or referral for individual therapy. They rarely refer for couples therapy, in spite of the research supporting such referrals. The list of possible reasons for this disconnect is long, but some reasonable guesses include that physicians may not know the research, may not have a trusted marriage therapist to whom they can send clients, or simply may not think to ask depressed patients about relationship difficulties (an area of struggle patients may not bring up on their own).

Beach and his colleagues believe that the link between depression and relationship difficulty is so strong that physicians ought to screen for relationship problems whenever they are diagnosing a patient with depression and considering treatment options. They developed a simple 10-item screening measure for relationship problems, with an 11th question for those who show relationship difficulty: Which came first?

Notes: Two quick things about the research base here: 1, the studies of marital therapy to treat depression have universally, as best as I can tell, looked at depressed women. Whether the suggested treatment course and likely outcomes would be the same with depressed men is open to question. 2, while studies have looked at marital therapy and marital satisfaction, there is no reason to believe that non-married people in committed relationships have a different kind of link between depression and relationship difficulty. The screening instrument can be used for married and nonmarried couples alike.

From the AAMFT Research Conference: Does marriage education work?

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Marriage education (also known as relationship enhancement or RE) has gotten a big, warm spotlight lately. A recent big-deal writeup in the Washington Post hit on the high points: Marriage education programs are big business, they have a lot of federal money supporting them, and there’s not a lot of research on them. Do they work?

That was the basic question tackled yesterday by Howard Markman at the AAMFT Research Conference in Alexandria, VA. In general, it looks like the research base for such programs is growing but still fairly small relative to the number of RE programs in existence. Markman and his colleagues located 30 studies examining 21 different programs since 2002 — meaning that a large number of programs offered at the annual SmartMarriages conference have not been researched at all. The research that does exist is usually promising, but not definitive: programs are generally shown to produce short-term improvements in couple satisfaction and communication skills. However, there have not been studies addressing whether these programs actually do what they set out to do, reducing the risk that couples will eventually divorce over the long term.

The federal government has been running a huge study that should be able to offer clearer answers. Involving eight sites and more than 5,000 couples around the country, the Building Strong Families (BSF) project sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families is testing voluntary RE programs offered to unmarried couples who are expecting or recently had a baby. The project just released its 15-month follow-up data, and the news is not good:

When results are averaged across all programs, RE did not make couples more likely to stay together or get married. In addition, it did not improve couples’ relationship quality.

As Markman was quick to note, the news was not all bleak. It would be more accurate to say that couples didn’t finish the programs than it would be to say that the programs didn’t work; with the exception of the project’s Oklahoma site (which performed much better than other sites in a variety of ways), only 9% of couples completed at least 80% of the relationship enhancement curriculum offered to them. That’s a big problem. Where couples did tend to finish their program — at the Oklahoma site — they were more likely to still be together at the 15-month follow-up, and experienced a number of other measurable improvements as well. Furthermore, only the Oklahoma site used a program that included most of PREP, one of the best-known and more well-researched relationship enhancement programs around. Other sites used less established curricula.

The study will be releasing its 3-year follow-up data in 2012. As Markman noted, the 15-month followup may simply be too early to see the hoped-for impact on marriage that these programs would offer; by definition, preventing marriage breakup is a long-term goal. It is possible that changes will emerge over time. Until they do, however, RE programs will continue to face skepticism. Which is good, if it drives more research that will develop programs that really do ultimately meet their preventive goals.

Marriage and the economy

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Slate engaged in a bit of a bogus trend story earlier this week, usually something the online magazine makes a habit of mocking. Under the title “Unwashed coffee mugs,” the story aims to educate us on the toll that the faltering economy has taken on marriages.

Let’s start with what the article gets right: 82 percent of the recession’s job losses have been suffered by men. As of last year, 25 percent of wives out-earned their husbands, a number that almost certainly has climbed with recent layoffs. And time-use data does indeed show that after men lose their jobs, they don’t suddenly find themselves inspired to do more housework; instead, “they spend more time sleeping, watching TV, and looking for a job.”

Getting to what that means for marriage, of course, is trickier.

To be sure, money is a common source of conflict in marriages. But the actual effects of recession on divorce rates are not that large:

Census Bureau figures show that over the past 2 1/2 decades, recessions have had only minor effects on divorce rates, which have been slowly waning since the early ’80s after 20 years of steadily rising. Those trajectories have been influenced more by the rise of the women’s movement and women’s earning power, lower fertility and changes in divorce laws than by dour Dows. The only recorded spike in divorces in the past 75 years came right after World War II.

Expect to see a lot more speculation about money and marriage over the next few months — it’s a common (and easy) theme to strike in writing about family life. But bear in mind that there are contradictory forces on families in a recession; they may suffer greater stress as a result of financial woes, sure. They also may be more likely to come together as a family to make it through a difficult time. Beware of stories that draw conclusions beyond what their data can support.

Myths about marriage

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Based on current research, which of the following statements do you think is true?

  • Single people are at greater risk of violence than married people.
  • College-educated women are more likely to get married than women with less education.
  • Married people have more sex than single people, and find their sex lives more emotionally satisfying than single people find theirs to be.

(The answer is at the bottom of this post.) I’m lead author on a study in the Oct-Dec 2008 American Journal of Family Therapy on the subject of myths about marriage. Based on a survey of more than 200 marriage and family therapists (MFTs) in California, we as a profession are not as up-to-date on things as we probably should be: The average MFT correctly identified less than 10 myths out of 21. On some items — including the first two items above — less than one in ten MFTs got the answer right.

We are an older profession demographically. The average age of respondents in the survey was above 50. And, in decades of practice, the research underlying what we do advances far beyond what we were taught in graduate school. It can be difficult to keep up with all of these advances in the midst of a full-time job seeing clients, and this is why most states mandate that we receive continuing education; in California, we’re required to complete 36 hours of CE every two years.

I came away from this study wondering about two things: One, what we can do better to keep therapists informed of research advances? Members of AAMFT get the association’s magazine and its journal, both of which provide up-to-date information on the best research in the field. Unfortunately, only about 10 percent of California MFTs are members. Are there other, better ways to get the word out when science advances? And two, how does this impact therapy? The short answer is it may not. Especially if the therapist is using a well-manualized treatment model, it could be argued that the therapist’s understanding of research is not all that important. Still, I find it hard to believe that what a therapist thinks they know about marriage sneaks into therapy in small ways — the little nudges we give our clients through the questions we ask, the nonverbal signals we give, and the homework we assign. If I believe (incorrectly) that a child is better off in a stepfamily than in a single-parent home, might I subtly nudge a couple considering becoming a stepfamily to tie the knot before they are prepared to do so?

The current study will soon be replicated with multiple professions, to see how MFTs compare with social workers, psychologists, and professional counselors. It will be interesting to see whether one’s professional orientation makes a difference in what we think we know.

The answer, by the way: All three statements are true.