Wed Apr 19, 2023 – 12:14 pm EDT
(LifeSiteNews) – An academic paper published in the Journal of Family Issues reaffirms that the risk of divorce decreases for individuals who grow up with siblings.
The study from Ohio State University Professor Douglas Downey comports with prior research he has conducted on the connection between having children and divorce rates. Professor Downey shared a copy of the paper with LifeSiteNews.
“Each additional sibling is associated with an 11 percent decline in the probability of divorce in China and a two percent decline in Europe, net a wide range of covariates,” Downey wrote in the paper with his Ohio State University peer Man Yao and Furman University’s Joseph Merry.
Merry himself published research in 2020 that found “each additional sibling was associated with a 10 percent decline in the probability of divorce,” according to the latest paper.
The authors offer several explanations for their findings.
First, they suggest that divorce and children are related to a third variable, such as religious beliefs and social conservatism. Conservative Christians, for example, may come from larger families themselves which oppose divorce and those individuals grow up to also oppose divorce.
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at LifeSite News
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