The basis of your argument conlmes from a nearly 30 year old study, featured by a religious conservative organization which is clearly espousing their agenda, not objective data and unbiased logic.
I've seen Teachman mentioned in several places, including academic articles.
The correlation exists because they say it does, not because it really does.
You should read the study before forming an opinion, and if you understand the methodology and can point out a solid problem with it, go ahead. Otherwise, it made it past some kind of peer-reviewed process. I think it was in the main journal of its field.
Exactly, which is why your insistence on using studies that link causation to statistical findings without good theory and sound arguments somewhat baffling.
It makes perfect sense that women who sleep around before marriage when compared with a virgin would be more likely to value marry less, or have some relationship rekindled with an old boyfriend, have some kind of emotional issues that could cause problems in marriage, and any other number of things that could cause problem.
Actually, that's exactly what it means.
That's totally illogical. All studies whose results appear in peer-reviewed journals started out as studies whose results did not appear in peer-reviewed journals. Journals reject articles if they don't think they contribute enough new information to the theory, if they upset the apple-cart of theory too much and the reviewers don't like the content or the editor doesn't want to take the risk, if the don't fit the journal well, and for many other reasons like that. Some of the top papers in various fields took a very, very long time to get in. I know a professor who had a theory that was somewhat paradigm shifting, and he waited 7 years to get his paper published, and finally got it published in a lesser ranked journal, but with a huge impact. The editor of the other journal eventually admitted it was a big mistake not to publish it.
As far as statistics go, a survey conducted with good methodology that is not published is as good as one that is not published.
Not only does that make no sense, it contradicts what you have been saying to this point.
No it doesn't. I'm just trying to be careful not to misstate what an academic study claims. Using 'correlate' also keeps me from having to look up the exact wording and constructs.
But even if that were true, that doesn't mean that the issue is sex before marriage, as is evidenced by the inclusion of people who had premarital sex, but only with one person... They are lumped in with the virgins and, according to a blog, still experiencing no "marital disruption." This goes to undermine the idea that premarital sex causes divorces and unhappy marriages.
Biblically, it makes sense. The man who seduced an unbetrothed virgin was required to marry her if her father would give him to her in marry. It may be fornication, but it doesn't violate 'two shall be one flesh' like those do who have multiple sex partners.
If the study broke down the number of people who cited premarital sex as a factor in or the cause behind their divorce, you'd have something there.
I think that's a silly requirements unless the researchers are studying those who think premarital sex is a factor. If you have only been married once and don't have experience being married to a person who had premarital sex and with one who hasn't how are you going to identify this as a factor leading to divorce? Besides, the study also showed couples who stayed together. Who is going to say premarital sex with multiple partners is the reason they stayed together?
[quote
Otherwise, you may as well sort people by who went to kindergarten and who didn't and linking that to marital bliss. You want to see the link, but that doesn't mean it is the link..[/quote]
If a good study shows a relationship, then it's reasonable to conclude that there may be a relationship. It could be a third factor that contributes to both kindergarten attendance and marital bliss.
Of course, the researcher can invalidate the results of the research by finding patterns in his data before formulating a hypothesis. If it's a sample rather than the whole population, that violates the assumptions of statistics. Bayseian approaches may be an exception to that. I'm not really into that branch of statistics and neither are the journals I'm interested in.
Considering what goes into a marriage and its success, which is subjective anyway, has far more to do with factors beyond sex, especially past sex, I think it is ignorant to say the smoking gun to not getting divorced is to not have premarital sex.
It's only one factor. Some in the virgin category divorced. Some in the non virgin category stayed married. But many, many more in the virgin category stayed married than in the non-virgin category.
Who cares about blog posts? It's an editorial by some person who may or may not have any background in the subject writing about their take on a subject they're not involved in. Give me an email and 20 minutes and I can put up a blog that contradicts his blog and the study, and still have time to go and change a Wikipedia article to back my beliefs up. As a blogger myself, I can say for a fact you might as well go ask a random stranger on the street what they think.
I think the blogger may be a sociology student or PhD, but I'm not sure. He had some results he showed. I may have seen a reference to an actual study about the topic as well. My memory is a bit fuzzy on that.
95% of people know that 100% of the studies that quantify percentage increases or decreases of subjective and relative information are complete baloney. You cannot quantify degrees of improvement or lack thereof on a subjective medium,
Basically, it sounds like you don't believe in much of the social science research that goes on in Psychology and other fields, because they quantify things like this all the time. You can look at the studies and see how they define their constructs and how they do their measurements. But unless you have been trained to interpret regression and other statistical tools, it's a bunch of gobbledygook.
especially when the medium is a variable interpretation even with the participants depending on other factors. For example, ask me 2 years after I got married to my first husband, I'd have said the marriage was fine. Ask me the year before we divorced, I'd have said it was a disaster and I can't wait to never see him again. Ask me now, 10 years post divorce, I'll say our marriage was generally happy, save until the end, I have good memories of my ex and hope he's doing well.
Heck, give me the survey today and I'd say we have the perfect marriage. Tell me tomorrow my husband had an affair our whole marriage and stole money to fund a secret drug habit, and even though it's not even 24 hours later, my answer will be different.
You can look at an individual study and if there is a measure of happiness, you can critique that study on an individual basis. They don't all use the same measurements.
There is a national study that measures happiness using certain values that are popular in the west, e.g. individual freedom, not harmony, etc. So Sweden ranks high and Japan ranks low. I've also seen a presentation of a paper on individual happiness that I thought had a cheesy definition of happiness. But the author's explain their definition in the paper and you can see what the results are and form your own opinions when you read this stuff.
In short, there is absolutely no way to say couples are 22% more happy than other couples, and point to one sole factor as to why.
You can within the limitations of how the constructs are defined and how the measurements are conducted.
You can't say premarital sex is the cause to divorces,
I didn't say that, but it does appear that women who engage in it with multiple partners are more likely to get divorced. I've seen a later study that tried to explain why non-virgins were more likely to divorce that tried to control for a long list of variables. The more variables you throw in, though, the more likely you'll account for some of the variance.
then say the fact that despite there are almost no people who list that as a cause for their divorce isn't relevant because people don't know that's the reason for their divorce. You're basically just saying "it's the reason because I say it is" and proving nothing beyond the fact you personally have a personal issue with premarital sex.
No, I'm not. I referred to a couple of academic studies, and you basically are saying you don't agree with them because you don't agree with them.
But that's not what you said. You said you think it's great to be the release to a spouse's decades-long pent up passion. I find zero atteactive, intimate, or appealing about the idea that decades before I came around my husband got hot and bothered by a girl and he put that arousal into a passion piggyback for me to answer instead.
EZoolander seemed to think if a potential partner were a virgin for too long, she'd be too sexually bored or uninterested. I was presenting an alternative explanation. I didn't say anything about a partner being hot and bothered by other women and directing that toward the spouse, and that's not what I had in mind.
Being on the receiving end of "I didn't have sex and now we are married so I'm making up for lost time and all of those instances where I wanted to before but didn't because it has been building in me for all this time, " yeah... No. Gross.
The idea of having a wife who directs lust for other men toward me isn't appealing, but the idea of having a wife who has been saving herself for her husband who wants to unleash the floodgates sounds fine to me.