Divorce “prediction”
Apr 17th, 2009 by Adrienne Keith
I’ve written in a previous post about various claims by researchers that they can predict divorce. Apparently, a US researcher claims that yearbook photos may predict divorce. See the story here.
The study started with an e-mail to 18,000 alumni, with only 428 people completing the survey. Of those 428 respondents, 79 were eliminated because of no yearbook photos. So, working from a small sample size (just 349 people), the researchers assigned a score for “smile intensity”. They found that 31% of the folks who frowned in the photos had divorced, compared to 11% of those with the biggest smiles.
I’m a little skeptical of these results, even though I’m fascinated by the premise that it’s possible to predict significant events with thin slices of data. Knowing that a number of things can contribute to divorce (among them education, age of marriage, time dating before marriage, and time after marriage before children), I think there’s more that can happen in a relationship than a smile in a yearbook photo would suggest. To divorce “prediction” researchers, I have this to say: Keep studyin’.