Tag Archives: socioeconomic status

Explaining why New Jersey has the lowest divorce rates in the United States

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The lowest divorce rates in the United States are in New Jersey and here’s why:

According to the 2011 American Community Survey released last month by the Census Bureau, New Jersey ranks last among the states in the percentage of residents 18 and older who are divorced. Just 9 percent of New Jersey adults are divorced, compared with nearly 52 percent of whom are now married.

“The composition of New Jersey married individuals is quite favorable across several indicators, providing some evidence for the low divorce rate,” said Susan L. Brown, a sociology professor and co-director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “These factors include education, race-ethnicity, age, and age at first marriage.”…

“They tend to delay marriage until an age when they’re emotionally and financially ready,” said Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers. “Higher education and high age at marriage are two of the most important factors that protect against divorce risk. And the current recession not withstanding, New Jersey is among the wealthier states in the nation, and economic stability also contributes to marital stability.”…

“In general, the northeastern states have lower divorce rates because their citizens are more highly educated and marry at older ages than do people in other regions,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins.

In other words, certain social conditions lead to lower rates of divorce in New Jersey and other northeastern states. Having more money, more education, and being older (all related to socioeconomic status?) leads to fewer divorces. These findings could also be related to recent suggestions that those with higher levels of education are more likely to marry (also see here).

Does this mean New Jersey will start promoting itself as a family-friendly state?

Social factors as part of a medical diagnosis

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This story from the Chicago Tribune tells of Dr. Saul Weiner who has been studying the effect of social circumstances, such as socioeconomic concerns, on medical diagnoses. After one of his own cases, Weiner decided to study the issue further:

Weiner arranged to send actors playing patients into physicians’ offices and discovered that errors occurred in 78 percent of cases when socioeconomic concerns were a significant factor, according to a paper published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Weiner recommends adding a “contextual history” to the physical history that physicians usually document with first-time patients.

Treating the whole person seems like it would produce better results for the patient.

“The Triumphant Decline of the WASP”

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A NY Times opinion piece from Harvard law professor Noah Feldman makes this argument: “The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.” Feldman explores the changes in the Supreme Court (the appointment of Kagan would make it 6 Catholics, 3 Jews) and Princeton (“As late as 1958, the year of the “dirty bicker” in which Jews were conspicuously excluded from its eating clubs, Princeton could fairly have been seen as a redoubt of all-male Protestant privilege).

So what changed? Feldman provides some reasons: “the anti-aristocratic ideals of the Constitution,” education was an important defining trait for WASPs so opening up universities was a big step, and the American value of fair play. The result:

Together, these social beliefs in equality undercut the impulse toward exclusive privilege that every successful group indulges on occasion. A handful of exceptions for admission to societies, clubs and colleges — trivial in and of themselves — helped break down barriers more broadly. This was not just a case of an elite looking outside itself for rejuvenation: the inclusiveness of the last 50 years has been the product of sincerely held ideals put into action.

These may be accurate reasons. But they seem to ignore the historical context: something happened in the 1960s that changed institutions like Ivy League schools and led to a very different looking Supreme Court. In that decade, the Civil Rights Movement plus an explosion in higher education for the burgeoning US population plus higher rates of immigration from non-European locales plus cultural change (rock ‘n’ roll, television, more open questioning of authority, etc.), changed, or at least began to change, the socioeconomic status of WASPs.