science

Note that the retraction happened in 2015. I had heard of the original study but not the retraction. (I expect that I would have heard of neither the study nor the retraction if the study wasn't about a politically charged topic).

People who left the study were actually miscoded as getting divorced.

At least it was a stupid mistake rather than poor study design.

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 ... 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.

This on the other hand... I haven't read the corrected study but I suspect this does not account for the fact that four different classes of illness were looked at, both because that's a common mistake and because it makes no sense to me that men would divorce women with heart disease but not with cancer, stroke, or lung disease.

(The probability that at least one study out of four would have significance > 95% simply by chance is 1 - 0.95^4 = 0.18549375.)

Edit: Now I'm scared that I didn't do the math correctly. That tends to happen when I try to be pedantic. Also there were eight categories, not four. (They also looked at women divorcing men.)

Interesting. The corrected data still leans in that direction.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine worked a few years helping people after traumatic brain injuries. She noticed the women always had a husband to help with their care, but all the men were devorced and alone.

Oh... I thought divorce rates increased when wives fell ill or when they got attacked with an ax. Which honestly feels like a good reason for divorce.

I wonder if some of that nuance is medical debt. If you divorce before the bills come in, can you get away with only the ill person getting the debt? If it's terminal, do you have a way to deny debt collectors by saying you're divorced?

Of course, the gender angle still suggests otherwise, but I imagine that's mostly a breadwinner/power dynamic that hopefully is changing with more women in the workforce.

I've heard of people getting divorced with terminal conditions because they don't want to leave their partner with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt.
I wonder if that plays any part in it.