Turned off the reblogs to the other post I did to just focus on Nyro's account rather than the other person I included. Please support this Sudanese artist who is trying to help her family!
pioneering something called "gritted teeth optimism" where everything is gonna turn out okay even if i have to bite and claw and gnash my way through it
everyone knows that space is very very cold, and the sun is very very hot. so i assume there's a bit of space kind of near the sun which is just right. balmy space
Quick, Merlin is trending! I'm using it as an excuse to ask you to share a merlin doodle or old sketch or WIP :D Or anything you want to share to celebrate this random day :)
Did a bit of a deep dive here because I am so angry at having "learned" this "statistic" YEARS after the paper was retracted (when it only existed for SIX MONTHS before it was retracted!!) and because reading retracted papers is fun science schadenfreude (seriously, check out the vaccines and autism one, it's awful, bring popcorn)
tl;dr
I believe the authors when they say it was an accidental error
The error was DUMB AS SH*T though and someone somewhere should have caught it
My faith in humanity('s ability to read a table with its brain on) is shaken
My faith in humanity('s loyalty to its sick spouses) is restored
This study doesn't have enough actual data to say anything about anything really
So reddit op was a bit misleading about what actually happened. This wasn't like a single page questionnaire that was just "1. Was your wife sick? 2. Did you divorce her?" and the problem didn't just affect the men.
This was a big huge public dataset which followed older married couples with a big huge survey on a billion things every 2 years for 18 years, then made the data available for people to analyze how they want.
These authors looked at how new health problems relate to later marriage outcomes. The outcomes being "still married," "divorced," "widowed," and "attrition" (=dropped out of the study before year 18)
PROBLEM IS they f*cked up the line of code that assigned couples to outcomes, and the "dropped out of the study" group got merged with the "divorced" group.
Friends. Do you have any idea how many people don't make it back for every single timepoint of an 18 YEAR LONG STUDY?
A LOT MORE THAN ACTUALLY GET DIVORCED
So most of the "divorces" in the original didn't actually happen, and the fake-divorce RNG happened to hit the sick-wife group hardest.
An honest mistake I'm sure, and the authors themselves were the ones who asked to retract the study (and republish their now-negative results) when they realized. So probably not malicious.
But this ALSO means that at least two authors, an editor, and 2-3 reviewers looked at a table that starts like THIS
And said "yeah less than 1% attrition seems right"
Like. like. We haven't even gotten to your gender biases yet.
You are looking at a result that says that, out of 2700 COUPLES, the study lost track of LESS THAN 27 OF THEM over the course of 18 YEARS.
And you're not going "hm that contradicts some basic things I know about humans"
Christ guys, I can't even keep a DnD group together for a year, and you're saying 99%+ of everyone turned in a survey every two years for EIGHTEEN YEARS? I don't believe you. YOU shouldn't believe you. You could have avoided this by just asking where all the dropout couples went.
Anyway, when you fix this the overall divorce rate is 6%.
You will notice that this is way the hell smaller than the widowhood rate of 24%. Four of every five marriages that ended during this study ended with a death, not a divorce. Way less bleak than the original!
And now they're left with 161 divorces, total, and are still trying to divide that into smaller groups to see changes in the rate for each group.
Unsurprisingly, they see nothing of note. The ONLY conclusions I actually trust in the corrected version of the paper are
The majority of 50+ year olds stay married for life
If illness in general affects divorce, the effect is too small to see here (or to matter in the real world. Divorce rate of 6% if both are healthy and 6-7% if one is sick? That's noise, baby!)
Husbands get sick more than wives (...in a population where the husband is more often the older spouse)
Life-threatening illness increases your risk of death
Being old increases your risk of death
Being "somewhat dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" with your marriage increases your risk of divorce
Groundbreaking.
They saw no gender difference in disease affecting divorce rates. They go on about how maybe the wife's heart disease specifically is correlated with divorce, but I'm pretty sure that's just us watching a researcher go through the stages of grief in a discussion section. Let it go, man. How many wife-heart-disease-divorce cases did you even have. 10 or something? You can't see a 2% change in 10 divorces, I don't care what false positive stats result you're clinging to.
TIL that study that says men divorce their sick wives was retracted in 2015 for a major error that severely skewed its results ("no response" was classified as "getting divorced" for men). Men do not actually divorce their sick wives at a higher rate than women divorce sick husbands. /end]
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