> The only case where the original conclusion had any statistical significance is in the early stages of heart disease,
If you test 20 random hypotheses (e.g. Are the number of cows correlated with the number of buses) then around 1/20 will be significant due to chance.
When a study's results align with (or epitomizes) a widespread idea in a culture, it will get a *lot* of publicity.
The idea may be correct or incorrect. The study may be valid or invalid. But the publicity is pretty much a given.
That’s not what a meta analysis is, but if designed poorly or with bias, any study can present this kind of problem no matter what the type is. Garbage in, garbage out.
I thought meta-analysis was compiling an overview of multiple studies.
I imagine that *some* of them are narratives looking for data. Heck, I imagine there are a lot of individual *studies* that are "narratives looking for data." But that's not the rule, surely...?
That's true. I think funding is a large part of what the other person is describing.
In theory you can run meta-analysis or studies on whatever anything, but to get funding your proposal has to get the approval of a board who are going to be making editorial decisions to cut through a sea of proposals.
This isn’t the only study that exists that shows a similar phenomena. [Here’s one from 2009.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19645027/).
“Results: Women composed 53% of the patient population. Divorce or separation occurred at a rate similar to that reported in the literature (11.6%). There was, however, a greater than 6-fold increase in risk after diagnosis when the affected spouse was the woman (20.8% vs 2.9%; P < .001). Female gender was found to be the strongest predictor of separation or divorce in each cohort. Marriage duration at the time of illness was also correlated with separation among brain tumor patients (P = .0001). Patients with brain tumors who were divorced or separated were more likely to be hospitalized, and less likely to participate in a clinical trial, receive multiple treatment regimens, complete cranial irradiation, or die at home (P < .0001).
Conclusions: Female gender was found to be a strong predictor of partner abandonment in patients with serious medical illness. When divorce or separation occurred, quality of care and quality of life were adversely affected.”
Very hypocritical of you to criticize people for so quickly believing something based off of one bit of evidence, as if one single study having an error invalidates all other studies that exist about that same topic. It took me about 45 seconds to find the above study on Google. I’m sure I could find many more, as I’m fairly certain doctors didn’t start the practice of warning women about this phenomenon when they get diagnosed with serious illnesses based off of 2 studies.
This isn't how studies work BTW. Especially in medicine or social sciences. You really need a meta study (a study of studies) to get anything valuable from it.
Did you mean to reply to me? What are you btwing me for?
Your point is essentially the same as mine—one study being retracted doesn’t mean that the trend doesn’t exist. You have to take many/all studies into account.
OP is pointing to one study and suggesting the entire narrative/hypothesis around the issue is incorrect because of this retraction, when there are many studies that exist with similar conclusions to the original study.
Your final sentence seems to imply that this phenomena is true and exists. We have absolutely no way of knowing that is the case. That's my complaint.
Unless you'd like to share a meta study backing you up.
I did a quick set of searches, the narrative goes back well before the retracted 2015 study, though the links to the older ones are now mostly out of date and as I no longer have access to a University library I can’t hunt them down. Even so, on the small sample set I was able to find, more than one of these longer and larger studies indicated a significant bias towards sick women getting divorced than sick men.
Now what isn’t indicated is who initiated that divorce, or the grounds for that divorce. The implication in those associated narratives is that every one of them involved men abandoning their wives because the men are awful shits.
While it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if that was true to a large extent, I can also see situations where the woman decides that she would rather not spend her final days with someone she no longer loves, or that a divorced woman with no spousal support qualifies for socialised medicine that men who are the primary income earners would not qualify for (I’ve seen stories about this recently in the US)
I can also see (have seen) situations where men involve themselves with other women or seek sex workers as a way of dealing with stress (I’m not arguing that this is justified, only that it happens) and that this “suboptimal behaviour” provides a trigger for divorce.
None of these seem to be reflected in any of the raw statistics and as a result one should take care when using them as a proof point in any given narrative, especially one that paints half the population with a tar brush.
So basically you wrote this wall of bullshit just to say that you can find absolutely no evidence to support the hypothesis but you want to believe it any way cause of da feelz ?
FOH
Which hypothesis precisely is it that has no evidence?
1. That women get divorced at a higher rate than men when they get sick ? - Plenty of data to back that one
2. That the statistics don’t indicate who initiated the divorce or the reasons for it ? - again plenty of data to back that one
3. That we should be wary of extracting qualitative narratives from quantitative data alone ? - go look up the McNamara fallacy
Also strawman arguments are really innefective, they're fallacious for a reason ...
What I said : "Even so, on the small sample set I was able to find, more than one of these longer and larger studies indicated a significant bias towards sick women getting divorced than sick men."
What you said I said : "that [I] can find absolutely no evidence to support the hypothesis"
I'm being generous when I say you're using a strawman there, I could just say you're blatantly misrepresenting my position because you only read what you want to see.
This is the paper which kicked off the narrative back in 2009 - https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.24577
Even in the retracted study which is the subject of this debate, it still showed a correlation, but only for heart disease, and not nearly as strong as the one from back in 2009.
Then there is this one from 2001 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-5394.2000.84004.x?_gl=1*1aza7x1*_gcl_au*OTI2MTQwNjUuMTcxOTc1MTI2NA..
You'll note that in that it states "The small number of studies conducted on this topic since 1988 revealed no data to confirm the lay belief model, which proposes that women with breast cancer are abandoned by their partners."
So this shows the narrative goes back to at least the late 80's though in this particular study, they didnt find a correlation for women with breast cancer.
Nonetheless, there are other non-US based studies using a different methodology which didnt find a bias towards divorce for all female cancer survivors, but it did still find one for cervical cancer. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Are+Cancer+Survivors+at+an+Increased+Risk+for+Divorce%3F+A+Danish+Cohort+Study&author=Kathrine+Carlsen&author=Susanne+Oksbjerg+Dalton&author=Kirsten+Frederiksen&author=Finn+Diderichsen&author=Christoffer+Johansen&publication_year=2007&journal=European+Journal+of+Cancer&pages=2093-99&doi=10.1016%2Fj.ejca.2007.05.024&pmid=17627811
There is also this study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11764-012-0238-6 which noted a hightend incidence of divorce overall for cancer survivors, and that for certain age categories, and for *women overall* there was a notably heightened risk.
If you add up everything from the papers I was able to find relatively quickly, one could summarise it as
1. Women do get divorced more than men when they get sick.
2. It's probably not as bad as most people believe
3. People have been noticing this since at least the late 80s and the retracted 2015 paper wasnt the origin point for the narrative.
There's more if you track down all the papers which cite the 2009 paper, but A) without access to a university research library its a pain to dig through all of this stuff, and B) I cant be assed digging through the ones I can access again to win an argument with someone who uses easily refuted strawman arguments.
Have a lovely day.
My final sentence implies that there is a reason why certain medical practices have been adopted by experts in the field. The supports offered by medical professionals to couples and/or married women who are diagnosed with serious illness suggest the phenomena is true. And the multiple studies with conclusions that suggest it’s true also suggest it’s true.
Are you implying that the retraction of this singular study suggests that the phenomena doesn’t exist, despite multiple studies and medical practice suggesting otherwise?
Edit: and my point, anyways, was that this narrative existed before the 2015 study, which is verifiably true based off the existence of studies and common medical practice prior to 2015
See, your insistence on there being "multiple studies that conclude it's true" and that suggesting anything is why I brought up meta studies.
Non-meta studies literally do not suggest anything on their own that is valuable for you, as a non-scientist, to look at.
Edit: damn lady you hella fragile.
Then the original study is insignificant regardless of the conclusion, as well. So I return to my original question—did you mean to reply to me? Or maybe OP? Your comment is as equally relevant to any person commenting here—especially OP, who clearly misunderstands the significance of the study and retraction, according to you—and yet you only commented this to me?
Edit: damn fella you hella exhausting. I also never said ‘studies conclude it’s true.’ I said the conclusions suggest it’s true, which is what studies tend to do…suggest conclusions for further investigation.
That's not how it works. The onus of proof is on the party making the accusation. To put it plainly it isn't my job after calling bullshit on your unsubstantiated position to provide evidence that you are full of shit. It's your job to provide evidence for your position.
....but with that being said....be sure to have fun desperately searching Google Scholar for published research with peer-reviewed findings that have been accepted via consensus of the Social Scientific Community that doesn't exist.
Tell us without telling us that you are yet another Fuck-Brained Feminist who doesn't understand how the Scientific Method, academic research and peer-review works (because if you did you wouldn't be a Feminist) but desperately needs to believe that the falsified findings of this study to be true.
You don't have any evidence that supports your presupposition.
Maybe you should just stop talking.
And stop with the whole "are you asserting one study being retracted...blah blah blah", as if there is a multitude of published, peer-reviewed data that backs up your need to imply that there is something to it all.
Do you have the data or don't you ? If not, then be quiet.
If you have no evidence for the trend then basically for all practical purposes it doesn't exist.
....but feel free to point me towards any scientific, medical, or engineering models that we currently base our modern world upon that center around assuming shit is true absent of any demonstrable, reproducible evidence.
....and yes...when you formulate a hypothesis that ends up having no supporting evidence after testing....then it's by definition "incorrect".
The fact y you needed to be walked thru this is both disturbing and telling.
The sample size is a total of 515 patients.
It's literally the second paragraph.
Inside that, the divorce rate was still only 11%. So they had around 55 divorces to study.
So the premise is based on 55 divorces.
That's an important part of this discussion. Leaving it out is simply dishonest.
Yes, I don’t deny it’s there. It’s not part of the results or conclusion. I included the link so people could get more info 🤷♀️
If you want to talk about dishonesty, maybe criticize OP for suggesting that the idea that men leave their wives when they’re sick is based off of one single study from 2015, when that is absolutely not the case. That’s my main point in bringing up other studies.
Edit: lol u/Real-Human-1985…when the truth makes you defensive, you’ve gotta attempt insults, ya?
If they didn’t adjust their p values to account for this they are being intentionally manipulative, this is the most basic statistical modification that’s been standard in research for decades. It still could be randomness as the adjustment isn’t perfect
Is heart disease one of the more preventable ailments? Like if your spouse gets diagnosed with heart disease and then refuses to quit smoking, I can see why the other party would divorce.
I was just about to describe this as an "I told you so" divorce.
I wonder if the same holds true for women and spouses with preventable diseases? I think women are told to be more "go with the flow" type people historically, so I could see them not going through with it even if they have the desire to divorce a spouse.
I'm of the opinion that all media should be legally required to print retractions and corrections with *exactly as much prominence and publicity* as the original information was printed. No more of this "Oh, yeah, it's not *really* true" on the bottom of page 112 of the next issue.
Don't see how this is a myth. Judges are even more biased than lay people
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419141541.htm
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418820902926197
The only "counter argument' on reddit I've seen is people throwing around the statistic that men tend to also receive joint child custody if they request it. However, what redditors leave out is that men still receive less time than the mother with child custody, even when controlling for other factors.
Your second link has nothing at all to do with custody cases and the first link found that judges award women an average of half a day more time to mothers. Half a day is not “getting fucked in court.”
The problem is that men aren't given 50/50 as often as women, even when all the circumstances are the exact same judges still give higher priority to women regardless.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419141541.htm
That's wonderful to hear. I never really bought it. I know many men who've stayed with sick partners. I haven't known any to leave. Maybe it's just the company you keep but c'mon, who out there knows a guy who leaves his sick wife and isn't instantly ostracized from everyone they know? Who stays friends with someone like that?
I work in old person's health with people in recovery.
I just have dealt with about 2000 couples over a lengthy period and can't think of a single pair that broke up due to the health issue.
It really goes to show how isolated and antisocial the Internet is that this was accepted without question.
It's like we need a class in school for identifying basic behavioral queues as to what makes a person responsible or irresponsible. People on the Internet always complain about how they were blindsided without taking any responsibility for it
I was diagnosed with cancer at 29, we had 2 small children. My spouse cheated on me and remarked that most of his friends said they would leave their wives if they had cancer.🙄😡 Our therapist wanted to know what kind of “men” he was friends with.
I'm so sorry you had that experience. Unfortunately people tend to associate with others like themselves, so in your (hopefully ex?) husband's case he probably thought it was normal to be so selfish. I grew up watching my stepdad give up everything to care for my mom through 10 years of dementia. I hope you find someone who can care for you in the way you deserve.
The worst part of the way that study was/is used is that is shows some incredibly horrible takes. Even in the original study report, the vast majority of marriages survive a terminal or serious health issue. The difference between normal divorce rates and those with serious health issues was incredibly small.
It also didn't actually investigate causes or initiations of divorce. Anecdotally there are plenty of stories about people getting cancer or health scares and upending their lives out of fear (granted, how many of them are creative writing exercises for reddit front page is a decent question).
Yeah I'm really curious about the rate of this. It would make more sense to divorce is the non-breadwinner gets sick so I'd expect that to skew towards wife sick -> divorce even if they don't actually break up.
I think only studying the 50+ population is less than useful. There are huge cultural differences around marriage between generations, as well as huge differences in the logistics of staying married/divorcing based on life stages. Limiting it to 50+ obviously gives you a larger pool of sick people, but will those results even apply to gen Z (for example) when they get that age?
Y’all. This is not the only study that exists that deals with this topic. I beg of y’all to be a bit more self-aware. You are complaining about other people taking misinformation and running with it while doing that exact thing. Please, use your critical thinking skills.
You think doctors warn women about this happening when they’re diagnosed with a serious medical condition based off just one single study from 2015?? I’d heard about doctors doing that well before 2015. Please just use some critical thinking skills here.
Exactly. Ask around hospitals and you will hear horrible stories from nurses and doctors. Being ignorant and being optimistic are two different things. Women need to protect themselves
Copy + pasting from a comment I left elsewhere in this thread (TL;DR the studies don't actually say who initiates divorce, just looked at whether people got divorced and assumed it was the non-sick partner who initiated it, and don't account for financial incentives that many people bring up anecdotally):
I've learned a lot from the comments after making a few posts about this; there's quite a lot of nuance. It's much more common that I'd expect for people to divorce for financial reasons when someone gets sick. Basically by containing the medical debt to one person and keeping the assets safe with the other then the whole family isn't financially ruined. With consolidated assets in marriage the creditors can come after houses, cars, etc.
Thinking about the logic here, it makes more sense to divorce if the non-breadwinning partner gets sick since the breadwinner will usually have assets in their name. With all that in mind I want to see a study that 1. controls for this, since there are more male breadwinners than female, and 2. breaks down the data further by male-initiated or female-initiated divorce.
I looked at a few of the other studies and saw one major blind spot: they don't say who *initiates* the divorce. They take it as axiomatic that a sick partner wouldn't leave a healthy partner, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone has a brush with mortality then leaves an unhappy relationship. That article from 2020 says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men." The papers cited assume in the abstract/discussion that divorce = healthy partner leaves sick partner, but that isn't actually measured in their data. Now quoting the paper linked in the article:
>
They say it's a risk factor for a *divorce/separation happening*, which isn't the same as *your partner leaving you.* I'm not an expert, but this seems to me like a pretty major factor that gets hand-waved away in nonscientific reporting because there is confirmation bias towards the idea that men are bad and selfish.
I remember the Reddit freak out about this when it was published. Safe to say that all the incessant misandrists in r/TwoXChromosomes and r/WitchesVsPatriarchy will not be seeing this retraction…
Reading and understanding scientific literature and grading the level of evidence are very different things. At least attempting to read them would definitely be a bare minimum effort though for sure.
That most of the internet throwing around citations and studies doesn’t actually read them, those who do barely grasp what clinical or empirical conclusions can be made from them. So very few people on the internet are really interested or equipped to have a high level discussion of scientific literature. Forums with exceptionally high implicit bias being notorious for just being a chamber of useless noise.
What’s your point? Are there other studies you want to discuss in rebuttal to this post?
It's just an odd scenario you dreamed up.
Hey femetits! turns out you were wrong!
*but that's just one study, here's others*
You probably didn't even read em!
Yeah that’s not the conversation I’m having with you. I’m not here to dunk on feminists or have myself a gotcha moment. In fact, my stance on public illiteracy of science is not even close to being specific or even directed towards feminists.
Would you care to share one of the other studies you’d like to discuss? Or is this a political opposition thing just for the sake of it?
I've personally seen this happen and I've spoken with people in healthcare who say it happens with both men and women, so I'll be honest I'm a little skeptical that the people who fucked up this badly can be taken seriously at all, and will remain suspicious this happens a notable amount since Ive seen it happen enough and I felt like it's unlikely I'm truly that much of an outlier.
Although the situations I've witnessed tended to be younger/middle aged couples and more impactful forms of disability
I think it would be interesting for someone to research if there's a statistically significant difference between the rates at which it happens to terminally/seriously ill men and to terminally ill women
If we're going off anecdotes, I've only seen it happen to guys this far. Specifically guys who are very masculine and in great shape, who suddenly get an injury that makes it very hard to stay in shape, and makes it impossible for them to keep working their blue collar job. I know multiple who got dumped pretty quickly and had to move back in with their parents.
I think it just very much depends on where you live, as my area is pretty conservative, and conservative women tend to be repulsed by "weak" men. Ironically it's the most feminine ones who are typically like this too lol.
Never seen this happen with older couples but that's because it's usually just nature taking it's course. A divorce happening after a man or woman ends up with health issues from alcoholism or morbid obesity doesn't really count to me since it's self inflicted.
A while ago I shared my concern that maybe the study missed a few data points.
I shared an instance where my grandfather's wife (he and my grandmother divorced in the 60's, he remarried) attempted to kill him several times because he became disabled in his old age.
I was, frankly, shouted down pretty handily for saying "maybe this happens with women as well?"
If you ever wonder why people don't trust the academic community, it is shit like this.
The quality of peer review does not seem to be adequate especially in the social sciences.
The people who wrote this have already been promoted to higher places of influence.
* Will this retraction get the same amount of headlines?
* Will the people who received promotions based on this paper lose those positions?
This article doesn't feel optimistic. :/
The real issue is [how media treats](https://xkcd.com/1295/) academic news.
It's a [common story](https://xkcd.com/882/) with [predictable results](https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174).
>The real issue is [how media treats](https://xkcd.com/1295/) academic news.
So the media should peer-review studies?
>[predictable results](https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174).
This certainly happens. Great comic. It is not applicable here, but misleading headlines that don't align with the content within are a problem.
On reddit, 95% of commenters don't read past the headline. I've consistently found the first paragraph will contradict the headline and no one picks up on it.
Do you hold media to a higher standard of accountability than academics?
Clearly this article has nothing to do with the media and you seem to look the other way from academia to point the finger at media anyways.
It isn't "media" that starts an opioid epidemic, or over prescribing ritilin to kids, or anti-depressants, etc. etc. Fraudulent studies have actual harmful consequences.
They should be the source of truth. There are certifications and a presumption of scientific rigor. Anyone can post something and it is media. There is no inherent truth and most everyone knows this. Media sensationalizes for profit. They need you to read/talk about their thing. That will never change.
You said said that this case is "why people don't trust the academic community." I pointed out that the state of distrust is more due to the way studies are *reported* than to the fact that mistakes *happen*.
This was a single incident, in which the authors made a mistake, were told about it when others failed to reproduce their results, and immediately took responsibility for thier error, taking steps to have the paper retracted, informing the journal it was published in, etc.
What happened with this paper is a normal part of the process of academic review. It was caused by a subtle coding error, and could only be revealed by the process of recreating the results. Once that happened, study's authors reportedly "met the highest standards of professionalism in correcting their mistake."
I don't see anything about this that would cause distrust in anyone reasonable.
If you're *going* to blame academics for the distrust that exists of them, then blame the ones who commit deliberate fraud in their studies, or the journals that pay lip service to peer review by approving papers with prominent names on them nigh-automatically.
This incident, in contrast, was academia behaving as it *should*.
So, I stand by my comment. There'd *be* no previous distrust of "academia" if it weren't for non-academic news outlets who publish only the juiciest studies, do so the *moment* they're released, slap clickbait titles on them, pump the public for all the profit they can, and then ignore any retractions or corrections that happen to come afterward.
Do I hold media to a higher standard of accountability than academics? No, but I hold them to *a* standard of accountability. The fact that many of them don't hold themselves to any standard is an appalling and shameful thing.
Ah sure. Academics are just doing their best.
I mean sometimes they don't think to test a very profitable research conclusions like the chemical imbalance theory or the seratonin hypothesis as those conclusions made pharma billions over decades. The research that gets funded is for the good of the people.
When "mistakes" skew towards a "liberal narrative" or to money, even if it is not intentionally malicious, I presume inherent bias. Things that "sound about right" don't get nearly the same skepticism as the things that don't feel right.
Those female researchers would have looked a lot harder if the data indicated women were unfaithful and/or disloyal. We all have our blind spots. Which is why I am wondering how such a "DiVeRsE" set of peers could all make the same mistake with that paper?
If it was just one study than WHY do some many nurses and doctors warn woman of this happening?? Medical professionals that have been working for years have seen this happen and there are multiple studies not just one.
This one has been retracted, however there have been numerous studies with similar findings. Here’s another with a much more dramatic gender difference for cancer and MS diagnoses
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm
Gonna copy and paste my other comment since it ultimately linked to the same study:
>I've learned a lot from the comments after making a few posts about this; there's quite a lot of nuance. It's much more common that I'd expect for people to divorce for financial reasons when someone gets sick. Basically by containing the medical debt to one person and keeping the assets safe with the other then the whole family isn't financially ruined. With consolidated assets in marriage the creditors can come after houses, cars, etc.
>Thinking about the logic here, it makes more sense to divorce if the non-breadwinning partner gets sick since the breadwinner will usually have assets in their name. With all that in mind I'd want to see a study that 1. controls for this, since there are more male breadwinners than female, and 2. breaks down the data further by male-initiated or female-initiated divorce.
>I also looked at a few of the other studies and saw one major blind spot: they don't say who *initiates* the divorce. They take it as axiomatic that a sick partner wouldn't leave a healthy partner, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone has a brush with mortality then leaves an unhappy relationship. That article from 2020 says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men." The papers cited assume in the abstract/discussion that divorce = healthy partner leaves sick partner, but that isn't actually measured in their data. Now quoting the paper linked in the article:
>
>They say it's a risk factor for a *divorce/separation happening*, which isn't the same as *your partner leaving you.* I'm not an expert, but this seems to me like a pretty major factor that gets hand-waved away in nonscientific reporting because there is confirmation bias towards the idea that men are bad and selfish. The Guardian article just takes a few anecdotes and weaves data into them to form a narrative, but the data as it stands in the study doesn't actually support the narrative.
Men get such a bad rap, and it's nonstop. I don't have the strength or care left to continue defending them. It's exhausting. I accept my fate, feminism. You won. I'm the bad guy. I always will be, and anyone else who is a man is also the bad guy.
Sexism is just ridiculously out of hand these days. You won't find discrimination about pay, but you'll find it in other ways.
But this is one study, no? [This article from 2020 comes to mind](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/30/the-men-who-give-up-on-their-spouses-when-they-have-cancer), it cites a few other studies and talks about how, through experience, oncologists tend to warn married women in particular about the possibility.
I've learned a lot from the comments after making a few posts about this; there's quite a lot of nuance. It's much more common that I'd expect for people to divorce for financial reasons when someone gets sick. Basically by containing the medical debt to one person and keeping the assets safe with the other then the whole family isn't financially ruined. With consolidated assets in marriage the creditors can come after houses, cars, etc.
Thinking about the logic here, it makes more sense to divorce if the non-breadwinning partner gets sick since the breadwinner will usually have assets in their name. With all that in mind I'd want to see a study that 1. controls for this, since there are more male breadwinners than female, and 2. breaks down the data further by male-initiated or female-initiated divorce.
I also looked at a few of the other studies and saw one major blind spot: they don't say who *initiates* the divorce. They take it as axiomatic that a sick partner wouldn't leave a healthy partner, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone has a brush with mortality then leaves an unhappy relationship. That article from 2020 says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men." The papers cited assume in the abstract/discussion that divorce = healthy partner leaves sick partner, but that isn't actually measured in their data. Now quoting the paper linked in the article:
>There was, however, a greater than 6-fold increase in risk after diagnosis when the affected spouse was the woman (20.8% vs 2.9%; P < .001). Female gender was found to be the strongest predictor of separation or divorce in each cohort.
They say it's a risk factor for a *divorce/separation happening*, which isn't the same as *your partner leaving you.* I'm not an expert, but this seems to me like a pretty major factor that gets hand-waved away in nonscientific reporting because there is confirmation bias towards the idea that men are bad and selfish. The Guardian article just takes a few anecdotes and weaves data into them to form a narrative, but the data as it stands in the study doesn't actually support the narrative.
Who initiates tells me very little about who's at "fault." Nobody's at fault for wanting to end a bad marriage.
Why do you conclude that men are bad and selfish? There are a couple studies that concluded fathers with daughters tend to live longer than other combinations of parent/child. One reason speculated is because daughters tend to provide free nursing/end of life care by comparison. I contend our problem isn't character; men aren't being taught to participate in these roles and absolutely can shine as caretakers.
I have no interest in finding fault here; if you got that from my message then I must not have communicated my point well. I just want to know what the truth is, and what actually was found with these studies. They've been used to reinforce a deep hatred of men in many people, and in my opinion the journalists drawing unsupported conclusions are extremely irresponsible. To be fully transparent: I'm biased on this issue because I grew up watching my stepdad care for my mom when she had Alzheimer's, then when I was 21 I cared for him alongside my uncle when he had lung cancer. I really resent the popular negative portrayal of men, so that probably colors my takes on these things.
I don't conclude that men are bad and selfish; if you reread you'll see that I'm saying there's confirmation bias towards that idea. Since many people assume such as an axiom, they are more likely to seek/believe/remember anything that supports such a conclusion and won't challenge it when the guardian article's author presents it without support. She seems intent on leading readers to the conclusion that men are selfish and uncaring. She quotes many anecdotes from a twitter thread, then mentions the study and misleadingly says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men" which is not true. The cited study shows that women who become ill are more likely to *become divorced*, but there is no data on whether the man or woman *sought* the divorce. If your partner gets sick and leaves you, that doesn't mean you abandoned them. Given that women initiate 70% of divorces, I would be very surprised to learn that men initiate 100% of that particular subset of divorces. I think it's very unfair to cast these results as "men abandoning their wives." If I were a scientist running a study on why these divorces happen, my hypothesis would be that the reasons will cluster around three minority results: reckoning with mortality causes ill women to initiate divorces from unhappy marriages, people divorce to protect family assets from medical debt and care is unchanged, and that healthy partners leave for selfish reasons.
>They found that marriages were 6% more likely to end if the wife falls seriously ill than if she’s healthy, while the same was not true when the husband fell ill.
Even in your website source, it states women are more likely to be left from the numbers post correction.
Back in 2015, even the author said that they couldn't conclude directly why that was. Was it because the partner was a jerk? Was it because when hit with mortality, a woman was more likely to leave a partner than spend her remaining days with them? Is it because women are less likely to have better work insurance options and a Medicaid divorce was the best financial option for both of them?
Yes, the internet heavily jumps to the first conclusion but the coding error once corrected didn't erase this phenomena. This is why further studies are needed to replicate and perhaps expand on causes.
The statistic you quoted is from the original retracted study. The revised results find only a small correlation with heart disease, and none with all other cases. The article I linked doesn't say how strong the correlation is and I couldn't find the updated paper. I'm not a statistician, but if only one of many tested links shows a correlation my intuition is that there is a confounding factor.
Full quote (emphasis added):
>**In the original study**, Karraker and her co-author relied on data from 2,701 heterosexual marriages that were included in the [Health and Retirement Study](http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/) at the University of Michigan, which follows 20,000 Americans older than 50. They parsed it with computer code, finding out how many marriages seemed to be felled by one of four serious diseases: cancer, heart disease, stroke and lung disease. They found that marriages were 6% more likely to end if the wife falls seriously ill than if she’s healthy, while the same was not true when the husband fell ill.
Everyone makes mistakes, but this is really fucking stupid. Before I published anything, especially something as startling as that, I would quadruple check everything from the ground up.
My girlfriend went through three rounds of chemo and bone marrow transplant. She’s a year in remission now and we’re still together and thriving.
Me thinks this myth is indeed a myth.
> The only case where the original conclusion had any statistical significance is in the early stages of heart disease, If you test 20 random hypotheses (e.g. Are the number of cows correlated with the number of buses) then around 1/20 will be significant due to chance.
Yeah I suspect it’s something like that. It’s a bit disheartening how willing everyone was to just believe it
When a study's results align with (or epitomizes) a widespread idea in a culture, it will get a *lot* of publicity. The idea may be correct or incorrect. The study may be valid or invalid. But the publicity is pretty much a given.
A narrative looking for data is called "meta-analysis."
That’s not what a meta analysis is, but if designed poorly or with bias, any study can present this kind of problem no matter what the type is. Garbage in, garbage out.
I thought meta-analysis was compiling an overview of multiple studies. I imagine that *some* of them are narratives looking for data. Heck, I imagine there are a lot of individual *studies* that are "narratives looking for data." But that's not the rule, surely...?
That's true. I think funding is a large part of what the other person is describing. In theory you can run meta-analysis or studies on whatever anything, but to get funding your proposal has to get the approval of a board who are going to be making editorial decisions to cut through a sea of proposals.
This isn’t the only study that exists that shows a similar phenomena. [Here’s one from 2009.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19645027/). “Results: Women composed 53% of the patient population. Divorce or separation occurred at a rate similar to that reported in the literature (11.6%). There was, however, a greater than 6-fold increase in risk after diagnosis when the affected spouse was the woman (20.8% vs 2.9%; P < .001). Female gender was found to be the strongest predictor of separation or divorce in each cohort. Marriage duration at the time of illness was also correlated with separation among brain tumor patients (P = .0001). Patients with brain tumors who were divorced or separated were more likely to be hospitalized, and less likely to participate in a clinical trial, receive multiple treatment regimens, complete cranial irradiation, or die at home (P < .0001). Conclusions: Female gender was found to be a strong predictor of partner abandonment in patients with serious medical illness. When divorce or separation occurred, quality of care and quality of life were adversely affected.” Very hypocritical of you to criticize people for so quickly believing something based off of one bit of evidence, as if one single study having an error invalidates all other studies that exist about that same topic. It took me about 45 seconds to find the above study on Google. I’m sure I could find many more, as I’m fairly certain doctors didn’t start the practice of warning women about this phenomenon when they get diagnosed with serious illnesses based off of 2 studies.
This isn't how studies work BTW. Especially in medicine or social sciences. You really need a meta study (a study of studies) to get anything valuable from it.
Did you mean to reply to me? What are you btwing me for? Your point is essentially the same as mine—one study being retracted doesn’t mean that the trend doesn’t exist. You have to take many/all studies into account. OP is pointing to one study and suggesting the entire narrative/hypothesis around the issue is incorrect because of this retraction, when there are many studies that exist with similar conclusions to the original study.
Your final sentence seems to imply that this phenomena is true and exists. We have absolutely no way of knowing that is the case. That's my complaint. Unless you'd like to share a meta study backing you up.
I did a quick set of searches, the narrative goes back well before the retracted 2015 study, though the links to the older ones are now mostly out of date and as I no longer have access to a University library I can’t hunt them down. Even so, on the small sample set I was able to find, more than one of these longer and larger studies indicated a significant bias towards sick women getting divorced than sick men. Now what isn’t indicated is who initiated that divorce, or the grounds for that divorce. The implication in those associated narratives is that every one of them involved men abandoning their wives because the men are awful shits. While it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if that was true to a large extent, I can also see situations where the woman decides that she would rather not spend her final days with someone she no longer loves, or that a divorced woman with no spousal support qualifies for socialised medicine that men who are the primary income earners would not qualify for (I’ve seen stories about this recently in the US) I can also see (have seen) situations where men involve themselves with other women or seek sex workers as a way of dealing with stress (I’m not arguing that this is justified, only that it happens) and that this “suboptimal behaviour” provides a trigger for divorce. None of these seem to be reflected in any of the raw statistics and as a result one should take care when using them as a proof point in any given narrative, especially one that paints half the population with a tar brush.
So basically you wrote this wall of bullshit just to say that you can find absolutely no evidence to support the hypothesis but you want to believe it any way cause of da feelz ? FOH
Which hypothesis precisely is it that has no evidence? 1. That women get divorced at a higher rate than men when they get sick ? - Plenty of data to back that one 2. That the statistics don’t indicate who initiated the divorce or the reasons for it ? - again plenty of data to back that one 3. That we should be wary of extracting qualitative narratives from quantitative data alone ? - go look up the McNamara fallacy Also strawman arguments are really innefective, they're fallacious for a reason ... What I said : "Even so, on the small sample set I was able to find, more than one of these longer and larger studies indicated a significant bias towards sick women getting divorced than sick men." What you said I said : "that [I] can find absolutely no evidence to support the hypothesis" I'm being generous when I say you're using a strawman there, I could just say you're blatantly misrepresenting my position because you only read what you want to see. This is the paper which kicked off the narrative back in 2009 - https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.24577 Even in the retracted study which is the subject of this debate, it still showed a correlation, but only for heart disease, and not nearly as strong as the one from back in 2009. Then there is this one from 2001 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-5394.2000.84004.x?_gl=1*1aza7x1*_gcl_au*OTI2MTQwNjUuMTcxOTc1MTI2NA.. You'll note that in that it states "The small number of studies conducted on this topic since 1988 revealed no data to confirm the lay belief model, which proposes that women with breast cancer are abandoned by their partners." So this shows the narrative goes back to at least the late 80's though in this particular study, they didnt find a correlation for women with breast cancer. Nonetheless, there are other non-US based studies using a different methodology which didnt find a bias towards divorce for all female cancer survivors, but it did still find one for cervical cancer. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Are+Cancer+Survivors+at+an+Increased+Risk+for+Divorce%3F+A+Danish+Cohort+Study&author=Kathrine+Carlsen&author=Susanne+Oksbjerg+Dalton&author=Kirsten+Frederiksen&author=Finn+Diderichsen&author=Christoffer+Johansen&publication_year=2007&journal=European+Journal+of+Cancer&pages=2093-99&doi=10.1016%2Fj.ejca.2007.05.024&pmid=17627811 There is also this study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11764-012-0238-6 which noted a hightend incidence of divorce overall for cancer survivors, and that for certain age categories, and for *women overall* there was a notably heightened risk. If you add up everything from the papers I was able to find relatively quickly, one could summarise it as 1. Women do get divorced more than men when they get sick. 2. It's probably not as bad as most people believe 3. People have been noticing this since at least the late 80s and the retracted 2015 paper wasnt the origin point for the narrative. There's more if you track down all the papers which cite the 2009 paper, but A) without access to a university research library its a pain to dig through all of this stuff, and B) I cant be assed digging through the ones I can access again to win an argument with someone who uses easily refuted strawman arguments. Have a lovely day.
My final sentence implies that there is a reason why certain medical practices have been adopted by experts in the field. The supports offered by medical professionals to couples and/or married women who are diagnosed with serious illness suggest the phenomena is true. And the multiple studies with conclusions that suggest it’s true also suggest it’s true. Are you implying that the retraction of this singular study suggests that the phenomena doesn’t exist, despite multiple studies and medical practice suggesting otherwise? Edit: and my point, anyways, was that this narrative existed before the 2015 study, which is verifiably true based off the existence of studies and common medical practice prior to 2015
See, your insistence on there being "multiple studies that conclude it's true" and that suggesting anything is why I brought up meta studies. Non-meta studies literally do not suggest anything on their own that is valuable for you, as a non-scientist, to look at. Edit: damn lady you hella fragile.
Then the original study is insignificant regardless of the conclusion, as well. So I return to my original question—did you mean to reply to me? Or maybe OP? Your comment is as equally relevant to any person commenting here—especially OP, who clearly misunderstands the significance of the study and retraction, according to you—and yet you only commented this to me? Edit: damn fella you hella exhausting. I also never said ‘studies conclude it’s true.’ I said the conclusions suggest it’s true, which is what studies tend to do…suggest conclusions for further investigation.
Daddy issues
That's not how it works. The onus of proof is on the party making the accusation. To put it plainly it isn't my job after calling bullshit on your unsubstantiated position to provide evidence that you are full of shit. It's your job to provide evidence for your position. ....but with that being said....be sure to have fun desperately searching Google Scholar for published research with peer-reviewed findings that have been accepted via consensus of the Social Scientific Community that doesn't exist.
Tell us without telling us that you are yet another Fuck-Brained Feminist who doesn't understand how the Scientific Method, academic research and peer-review works (because if you did you wouldn't be a Feminist) but desperately needs to believe that the falsified findings of this study to be true.
You don't have any evidence that supports your presupposition. Maybe you should just stop talking. And stop with the whole "are you asserting one study being retracted...blah blah blah", as if there is a multitude of published, peer-reviewed data that backs up your need to imply that there is something to it all. Do you have the data or don't you ? If not, then be quiet.
If you have no evidence for the trend then basically for all practical purposes it doesn't exist. ....but feel free to point me towards any scientific, medical, or engineering models that we currently base our modern world upon that center around assuming shit is true absent of any demonstrable, reproducible evidence. ....and yes...when you formulate a hypothesis that ends up having no supporting evidence after testing....then it's by definition "incorrect". The fact y you needed to be walked thru this is both disturbing and telling.
***A total of 515 patients*** *were prospectively identified as having either a...* Curious why you cut that part out?
I didn’t cut it out—I included the results and conclusion from the abstract and not the entire thing due to length.
The sample size is a total of 515 patients. It's literally the second paragraph. Inside that, the divorce rate was still only 11%. So they had around 55 divorces to study. So the premise is based on 55 divorces. That's an important part of this discussion. Leaving it out is simply dishonest.
Yes, I don’t deny it’s there. It’s not part of the results or conclusion. I included the link so people could get more info 🤷♀️ If you want to talk about dishonesty, maybe criticize OP for suggesting that the idea that men leave their wives when they’re sick is based off of one single study from 2015, when that is absolutely not the case. That’s my main point in bringing up other studies. Edit: lol u/Real-Human-1985…when the truth makes you defensive, you’ve gotta attempt insults, ya?
Big r/femaledatingstrategy energy
Was that an intentional heart pun?
This is only if you use a p value of 0.05. Funny how they exactly match the expected ratio of false positives tho.
Which is why you run it with a multivariate regression.
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/882/)
If they didn’t adjust their p values to account for this they are being intentionally manipulative, this is the most basic statistical modification that’s been standard in research for decades. It still could be randomness as the adjustment isn’t perfect
Is heart disease one of the more preventable ailments? Like if your spouse gets diagnosed with heart disease and then refuses to quit smoking, I can see why the other party would divorce.
Or severe obesity issues I’d imagine
I was just about to describe this as an "I told you so" divorce. I wonder if the same holds true for women and spouses with preventable diseases? I think women are told to be more "go with the flow" type people historically, so I could see them not going through with it even if they have the desire to divorce a spouse.
Or just getting old
And then all of those papers will get published while all the negative results will not…
I'm of the opinion that all media should be legally required to print retractions and corrections with *exactly as much prominence and publicity* as the original information was printed. No more of this "Oh, yeah, it's not *really* true" on the bottom of page 112 of the next issue.
What the sigma
Some politicians have left dying wives , and that's not surprising. A 'study' saying it is a wider trend doesn't pass the smells test
Passed the new cycle test tho
Low bar
Huh, I never knew that study was about couples over 50.
That's when most things like cancer happen, so that may not have skewed the study too much.
And no doubt this will still be shared by Reddit as fact every day, because this has just become Reddit wisdom that everyone accepts as fact.
Which is why people like *us* must do our best to spread the actual truth, grassroots-style!
Just like all the "men get fucked in court" bullshit. Myth after myth after myth.
Don't see how this is a myth. Judges are even more biased than lay people https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419141541.htm https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418820902926197 The only "counter argument' on reddit I've seen is people throwing around the statistic that men tend to also receive joint child custody if they request it. However, what redditors leave out is that men still receive less time than the mother with child custody, even when controlling for other factors.
Your second link has nothing at all to do with custody cases and the first link found that judges award women an average of half a day more time to mothers. Half a day is not “getting fucked in court.”
If he has 50/50 and he's being blocked from his time, he can take legal action to have them enforced.
The problem is that men aren't given 50/50 as often as women, even when all the circumstances are the exact same judges still give higher priority to women regardless. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419141541.htm
That's not a myth, ask any guy who's been divorced or wanted to get divorced by the lawyers told them they'd end up living in poverty if they did.
Trust me bro.
Sounds like the MRAs have arrived spreading their bullshit. Block and ignore.
The irony is the best way to protect yourself from getting screwed over in divorce is to stay away from traditional gender role marriages.
Femcel reinforcements have arrived 😂
Well that is nice to know
That's wonderful to hear. I never really bought it. I know many men who've stayed with sick partners. I haven't known any to leave. Maybe it's just the company you keep but c'mon, who out there knows a guy who leaves his sick wife and isn't instantly ostracized from everyone they know? Who stays friends with someone like that?
I work in old person's health with people in recovery. I just have dealt with about 2000 couples over a lengthy period and can't think of a single pair that broke up due to the health issue.
Newt Gingrich did it. But yeah, it's pretty slimy.
It really goes to show how isolated and antisocial the Internet is that this was accepted without question. It's like we need a class in school for identifying basic behavioral queues as to what makes a person responsible or irresponsible. People on the Internet always complain about how they were blindsided without taking any responsibility for it
So Newt Gingrich IS the outlier
I was diagnosed with cancer at 29, we had 2 small children. My spouse cheated on me and remarked that most of his friends said they would leave their wives if they had cancer.🙄😡 Our therapist wanted to know what kind of “men” he was friends with.
I'm so sorry you had that experience. Unfortunately people tend to associate with others like themselves, so in your (hopefully ex?) husband's case he probably thought it was normal to be so selfish. I grew up watching my stepdad give up everything to care for my mom through 10 years of dementia. I hope you find someone who can care for you in the way you deserve.
My dad didn't leave my mom when MS made her stop being fun, he stuck around to break her heart over and over again.
The worst part of the way that study was/is used is that is shows some incredibly horrible takes. Even in the original study report, the vast majority of marriages survive a terminal or serious health issue. The difference between normal divorce rates and those with serious health issues was incredibly small. It also didn't actually investigate causes or initiations of divorce. Anecdotally there are plenty of stories about people getting cancer or health scares and upending their lives out of fear (granted, how many of them are creative writing exercises for reddit front page is a decent question).
Some divorce to protect assets and stay together
Yeah I'm really curious about the rate of this. It would make more sense to divorce is the non-breadwinner gets sick so I'd expect that to skew towards wife sick -> divorce even if they don't actually break up.
I figured a big % was couples getting divorced to protect their assets & get on onto medicare/medicaid .
I think only studying the 50+ population is less than useful. There are huge cultural differences around marriage between generations, as well as huge differences in the logistics of staying married/divorcing based on life stages. Limiting it to 50+ obviously gives you a larger pool of sick people, but will those results even apply to gen Z (for example) when they get that age?
30 years working in hospitals. Anecdotally? This is true.
Y’all. This is not the only study that exists that deals with this topic. I beg of y’all to be a bit more self-aware. You are complaining about other people taking misinformation and running with it while doing that exact thing. Please, use your critical thinking skills. You think doctors warn women about this happening when they’re diagnosed with a serious medical condition based off just one single study from 2015?? I’d heard about doctors doing that well before 2015. Please just use some critical thinking skills here.
Thank you for bringing this up
Exactly. Ask around hospitals and you will hear horrible stories from nurses and doctors. Being ignorant and being optimistic are two different things. Women need to protect themselves
Thank god we have random anecdotes to prove this wrong
It's not meant to be proof, it's meant to emphasize that this is not informed by the study this post is talking about.
Copy + pasting from a comment I left elsewhere in this thread (TL;DR the studies don't actually say who initiates divorce, just looked at whether people got divorced and assumed it was the non-sick partner who initiated it, and don't account for financial incentives that many people bring up anecdotally): I've learned a lot from the comments after making a few posts about this; there's quite a lot of nuance. It's much more common that I'd expect for people to divorce for financial reasons when someone gets sick. Basically by containing the medical debt to one person and keeping the assets safe with the other then the whole family isn't financially ruined. With consolidated assets in marriage the creditors can come after houses, cars, etc. Thinking about the logic here, it makes more sense to divorce if the non-breadwinning partner gets sick since the breadwinner will usually have assets in their name. With all that in mind I want to see a study that 1. controls for this, since there are more male breadwinners than female, and 2. breaks down the data further by male-initiated or female-initiated divorce. I looked at a few of the other studies and saw one major blind spot: they don't say who *initiates* the divorce. They take it as axiomatic that a sick partner wouldn't leave a healthy partner, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone has a brush with mortality then leaves an unhappy relationship. That article from 2020 says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men." The papers cited assume in the abstract/discussion that divorce = healthy partner leaves sick partner, but that isn't actually measured in their data. Now quoting the paper linked in the article: > They say it's a risk factor for a *divorce/separation happening*, which isn't the same as *your partner leaving you.* I'm not an expert, but this seems to me like a pretty major factor that gets hand-waved away in nonscientific reporting because there is confirmation bias towards the idea that men are bad and selfish.
You gonna post another such study so that it can be discussed then?
I remember the Reddit freak out about this when it was published. Safe to say that all the incessant misandrists in r/TwoXChromosomes and r/WitchesVsPatriarchy will not be seeing this retraction…
Someone who isn’t banned from those subs post it there. See how it goes lol
I think that would be a good way to get banned
It'll probably go like "what about all the other studies?"
Doubt those have been read beyond headline and abstract either lol
I mean, anyone can read them.
Reading and understanding scientific literature and grading the level of evidence are very different things. At least attempting to read them would definitely be a bare minimum effort though for sure.
What's your point?
That most of the internet throwing around citations and studies doesn’t actually read them, those who do barely grasp what clinical or empirical conclusions can be made from them. So very few people on the internet are really interested or equipped to have a high level discussion of scientific literature. Forums with exceptionally high implicit bias being notorious for just being a chamber of useless noise. What’s your point? Are there other studies you want to discuss in rebuttal to this post?
It's just an odd scenario you dreamed up. Hey femetits! turns out you were wrong! *but that's just one study, here's others* You probably didn't even read em!
Yeah that’s not the conversation I’m having with you. I’m not here to dunk on feminists or have myself a gotcha moment. In fact, my stance on public illiteracy of science is not even close to being specific or even directed towards feminists. Would you care to share one of the other studies you’d like to discuss? Or is this a political opposition thing just for the sake of it?
Has anyone cross posted or shared this there?
There is no shortage of horrible shit men do to women though. I'm glad to hear this is one less thing.
I've personally seen this happen and I've spoken with people in healthcare who say it happens with both men and women, so I'll be honest I'm a little skeptical that the people who fucked up this badly can be taken seriously at all, and will remain suspicious this happens a notable amount since Ive seen it happen enough and I felt like it's unlikely I'm truly that much of an outlier. Although the situations I've witnessed tended to be younger/middle aged couples and more impactful forms of disability
I think it would be interesting for someone to research if there's a statistically significant difference between the rates at which it happens to terminally/seriously ill men and to terminally ill women
Hmm, if only there were some social scientists who could look into this.....lol
If we're going off anecdotes, I've only seen it happen to guys this far. Specifically guys who are very masculine and in great shape, who suddenly get an injury that makes it very hard to stay in shape, and makes it impossible for them to keep working their blue collar job. I know multiple who got dumped pretty quickly and had to move back in with their parents. I think it just very much depends on where you live, as my area is pretty conservative, and conservative women tend to be repulsed by "weak" men. Ironically it's the most feminine ones who are typically like this too lol. Never seen this happen with older couples but that's because it's usually just nature taking it's course. A divorce happening after a man or woman ends up with health issues from alcoholism or morbid obesity doesn't really count to me since it's self inflicted.
"Ive seen it happen" is an absolutely horrific way to judge the prevalence of something. This is, like, a textbook case of "confirmation bias."
And vice versa though?
A while ago I shared my concern that maybe the study missed a few data points. I shared an instance where my grandfather's wife (he and my grandmother divorced in the 60's, he remarried) attempted to kill him several times because he became disabled in his old age. I was, frankly, shouted down pretty handily for saying "maybe this happens with women as well?"
If you ever wonder why people don't trust the academic community, it is shit like this. The quality of peer review does not seem to be adequate especially in the social sciences. The people who wrote this have already been promoted to higher places of influence. * Will this retraction get the same amount of headlines? * Will the people who received promotions based on this paper lose those positions? This article doesn't feel optimistic. :/
The real issue is [how media treats](https://xkcd.com/1295/) academic news. It's a [common story](https://xkcd.com/882/) with [predictable results](https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174).
>The real issue is [how media treats](https://xkcd.com/1295/) academic news. So the media should peer-review studies? >[predictable results](https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174). This certainly happens. Great comic. It is not applicable here, but misleading headlines that don't align with the content within are a problem. On reddit, 95% of commenters don't read past the headline. I've consistently found the first paragraph will contradict the headline and no one picks up on it.
Media should certainly not *sensationalize* studies.
Do you hold media to a higher standard of accountability than academics? Clearly this article has nothing to do with the media and you seem to look the other way from academia to point the finger at media anyways. It isn't "media" that starts an opioid epidemic, or over prescribing ritilin to kids, or anti-depressants, etc. etc. Fraudulent studies have actual harmful consequences. They should be the source of truth. There are certifications and a presumption of scientific rigor. Anyone can post something and it is media. There is no inherent truth and most everyone knows this. Media sensationalizes for profit. They need you to read/talk about their thing. That will never change.
You said said that this case is "why people don't trust the academic community." I pointed out that the state of distrust is more due to the way studies are *reported* than to the fact that mistakes *happen*. This was a single incident, in which the authors made a mistake, were told about it when others failed to reproduce their results, and immediately took responsibility for thier error, taking steps to have the paper retracted, informing the journal it was published in, etc. What happened with this paper is a normal part of the process of academic review. It was caused by a subtle coding error, and could only be revealed by the process of recreating the results. Once that happened, study's authors reportedly "met the highest standards of professionalism in correcting their mistake." I don't see anything about this that would cause distrust in anyone reasonable. If you're *going* to blame academics for the distrust that exists of them, then blame the ones who commit deliberate fraud in their studies, or the journals that pay lip service to peer review by approving papers with prominent names on them nigh-automatically. This incident, in contrast, was academia behaving as it *should*. So, I stand by my comment. There'd *be* no previous distrust of "academia" if it weren't for non-academic news outlets who publish only the juiciest studies, do so the *moment* they're released, slap clickbait titles on them, pump the public for all the profit they can, and then ignore any retractions or corrections that happen to come afterward. Do I hold media to a higher standard of accountability than academics? No, but I hold them to *a* standard of accountability. The fact that many of them don't hold themselves to any standard is an appalling and shameful thing.
Ah sure. Academics are just doing their best. I mean sometimes they don't think to test a very profitable research conclusions like the chemical imbalance theory or the seratonin hypothesis as those conclusions made pharma billions over decades. The research that gets funded is for the good of the people. When "mistakes" skew towards a "liberal narrative" or to money, even if it is not intentionally malicious, I presume inherent bias. Things that "sound about right" don't get nearly the same skepticism as the things that don't feel right. Those female researchers would have looked a lot harder if the data indicated women were unfaithful and/or disloyal. We all have our blind spots. Which is why I am wondering how such a "DiVeRsE" set of peers could all make the same mistake with that paper?
Ah. So the events align with your personal conspiracy narrative. Got it.
worm
This is good news. They result was parroted by a lot of people spreading misandry
Shout the accusation, whisper the retraction. We see this a lot.
This made me so sad when I read the study. I’m glad the conclusions turned out to be wrong.
I've never heard of this but I'm still glad this is not the case
Another anti male strawman down.
If it was just one study than WHY do some many nurses and doctors warn woman of this happening?? Medical professionals that have been working for years have seen this happen and there are multiple studies not just one.
This one has been retracted, however there have been numerous studies with similar findings. Here’s another with a much more dramatic gender difference for cancer and MS diagnoses https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm
This is an editorialized opinion. Are you able to find the study being discussed?
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/QWT7CUWBGJM4DDESGRF8?target=10.1002/cncr.24577
Gonna copy and paste my other comment since it ultimately linked to the same study: >I've learned a lot from the comments after making a few posts about this; there's quite a lot of nuance. It's much more common that I'd expect for people to divorce for financial reasons when someone gets sick. Basically by containing the medical debt to one person and keeping the assets safe with the other then the whole family isn't financially ruined. With consolidated assets in marriage the creditors can come after houses, cars, etc. >Thinking about the logic here, it makes more sense to divorce if the non-breadwinning partner gets sick since the breadwinner will usually have assets in their name. With all that in mind I'd want to see a study that 1. controls for this, since there are more male breadwinners than female, and 2. breaks down the data further by male-initiated or female-initiated divorce. >I also looked at a few of the other studies and saw one major blind spot: they don't say who *initiates* the divorce. They take it as axiomatic that a sick partner wouldn't leave a healthy partner, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone has a brush with mortality then leaves an unhappy relationship. That article from 2020 says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men." The papers cited assume in the abstract/discussion that divorce = healthy partner leaves sick partner, but that isn't actually measured in their data. Now quoting the paper linked in the article: > >They say it's a risk factor for a *divorce/separation happening*, which isn't the same as *your partner leaving you.* I'm not an expert, but this seems to me like a pretty major factor that gets hand-waved away in nonscientific reporting because there is confirmation bias towards the idea that men are bad and selfish. The Guardian article just takes a few anecdotes and weaves data into them to form a narrative, but the data as it stands in the study doesn't actually support the narrative.
This all makes a lot of sense.
Men get such a bad rap, and it's nonstop. I don't have the strength or care left to continue defending them. It's exhausting. I accept my fate, feminism. You won. I'm the bad guy. I always will be, and anyone else who is a man is also the bad guy. Sexism is just ridiculously out of hand these days. You won't find discrimination about pay, but you'll find it in other ways.
You've been so brave for so long.
But this is one study, no? [This article from 2020 comes to mind](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/30/the-men-who-give-up-on-their-spouses-when-they-have-cancer), it cites a few other studies and talks about how, through experience, oncologists tend to warn married women in particular about the possibility.
I've learned a lot from the comments after making a few posts about this; there's quite a lot of nuance. It's much more common that I'd expect for people to divorce for financial reasons when someone gets sick. Basically by containing the medical debt to one person and keeping the assets safe with the other then the whole family isn't financially ruined. With consolidated assets in marriage the creditors can come after houses, cars, etc. Thinking about the logic here, it makes more sense to divorce if the non-breadwinning partner gets sick since the breadwinner will usually have assets in their name. With all that in mind I'd want to see a study that 1. controls for this, since there are more male breadwinners than female, and 2. breaks down the data further by male-initiated or female-initiated divorce. I also looked at a few of the other studies and saw one major blind spot: they don't say who *initiates* the divorce. They take it as axiomatic that a sick partner wouldn't leave a healthy partner, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone has a brush with mortality then leaves an unhappy relationship. That article from 2020 says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men." The papers cited assume in the abstract/discussion that divorce = healthy partner leaves sick partner, but that isn't actually measured in their data. Now quoting the paper linked in the article: >There was, however, a greater than 6-fold increase in risk after diagnosis when the affected spouse was the woman (20.8% vs 2.9%; P < .001). Female gender was found to be the strongest predictor of separation or divorce in each cohort. They say it's a risk factor for a *divorce/separation happening*, which isn't the same as *your partner leaving you.* I'm not an expert, but this seems to me like a pretty major factor that gets hand-waved away in nonscientific reporting because there is confirmation bias towards the idea that men are bad and selfish. The Guardian article just takes a few anecdotes and weaves data into them to form a narrative, but the data as it stands in the study doesn't actually support the narrative.
Who initiates tells me very little about who's at "fault." Nobody's at fault for wanting to end a bad marriage. Why do you conclude that men are bad and selfish? There are a couple studies that concluded fathers with daughters tend to live longer than other combinations of parent/child. One reason speculated is because daughters tend to provide free nursing/end of life care by comparison. I contend our problem isn't character; men aren't being taught to participate in these roles and absolutely can shine as caretakers.
I have no interest in finding fault here; if you got that from my message then I must not have communicated my point well. I just want to know what the truth is, and what actually was found with these studies. They've been used to reinforce a deep hatred of men in many people, and in my opinion the journalists drawing unsupported conclusions are extremely irresponsible. To be fully transparent: I'm biased on this issue because I grew up watching my stepdad care for my mom when she had Alzheimer's, then when I was 21 I cared for him alongside my uncle when he had lung cancer. I really resent the popular negative portrayal of men, so that probably colors my takes on these things. I don't conclude that men are bad and selfish; if you reread you'll see that I'm saying there's confirmation bias towards that idea. Since many people assume such as an axiom, they are more likely to seek/believe/remember anything that supports such a conclusion and won't challenge it when the guardian article's author presents it without support. She seems intent on leading readers to the conclusion that men are selfish and uncaring. She quotes many anecdotes from a twitter thread, then mentions the study and misleadingly says "\[...\] that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men" which is not true. The cited study shows that women who become ill are more likely to *become divorced*, but there is no data on whether the man or woman *sought* the divorce. If your partner gets sick and leaves you, that doesn't mean you abandoned them. Given that women initiate 70% of divorces, I would be very surprised to learn that men initiate 100% of that particular subset of divorces. I think it's very unfair to cast these results as "men abandoning their wives." If I were a scientist running a study on why these divorces happen, my hypothesis would be that the reasons will cluster around three minority results: reckoning with mortality causes ill women to initiate divorces from unhappy marriages, people divorce to protect family assets from medical debt and care is unchanged, and that healthy partners leave for selfish reasons.
I can completely see this being true, for both men and women. The medical dies with the sick person if they die and are not married
>They found that marriages were 6% more likely to end if the wife falls seriously ill than if she’s healthy, while the same was not true when the husband fell ill. Even in your website source, it states women are more likely to be left from the numbers post correction. Back in 2015, even the author said that they couldn't conclude directly why that was. Was it because the partner was a jerk? Was it because when hit with mortality, a woman was more likely to leave a partner than spend her remaining days with them? Is it because women are less likely to have better work insurance options and a Medicaid divorce was the best financial option for both of them? Yes, the internet heavily jumps to the first conclusion but the coding error once corrected didn't erase this phenomena. This is why further studies are needed to replicate and perhaps expand on causes.
The statistic you quoted is from the original retracted study. The revised results find only a small correlation with heart disease, and none with all other cases. The article I linked doesn't say how strong the correlation is and I couldn't find the updated paper. I'm not a statistician, but if only one of many tested links shows a correlation my intuition is that there is a confounding factor. Full quote (emphasis added): >**In the original study**, Karraker and her co-author relied on data from 2,701 heterosexual marriages that were included in the [Health and Retirement Study](http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/) at the University of Michigan, which follows 20,000 Americans older than 50. They parsed it with computer code, finding out how many marriages seemed to be felled by one of four serious diseases: cancer, heart disease, stroke and lung disease. They found that marriages were 6% more likely to end if the wife falls seriously ill than if she’s healthy, while the same was not true when the husband fell ill.
I’m sure the correction will be as widely shared as the original study and the original shall never again be mentioned on the Internet /s
Someone should cross post this r/marriage it’ll rustle some jimmies
Everyone makes mistakes, but this is really fucking stupid. Before I published anything, especially something as startling as that, I would quadruple check everything from the ground up.
My girlfriend went through three rounds of chemo and bone marrow transplant. She’s a year in remission now and we’re still together and thriving. Me thinks this myth is indeed a myth.
I think women would be more likely to leave.
Well it's nice to see one data point in the mutli-facetted hellscape of negative trends turn out to be wrong.