Unfortunately, the original
article does not give the title of the study they are citing, the name of the
journal in which it appears, or where the researchers got their information. To
be fair, most people who are casually reading online news stories wouldn’t care
about the statistical methods employed or the degree of empirical rigor
employed by the research team; most Internet readers don’t appear to consider
the source at all. The Metro (UK) site isn’t exactly the BBC, but they aren’t
the Daily Mail, either, so I decided to run down the original research article…
As it turns out, the paper
the Metro (UK) people were talking about is called “A DIAMOND IS FOREVER” AND
OTHER FAIRY TALES: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WEDDING EXPENSES AND MARRIAGE DURATION,
and it appeared in the October 2015 issue of a journal called Economic Inquiry, which is published by
the Western Economic Association International. It’s the work of two economics
professors from Emory University, Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M Mialon, and as
you’d probably expect, it’s not quite as sensationalist as the Metro (UK)
headline, or even its own title, would have you believe…
Basically, what the
professors did was ask people to fill out a Qualtrics survey that provided
basic demographic information, an approximate range of what they spent on the
wedding, the rings, and such, and how long they had been/were married. They
then cleaned and adjusted the data to account for as many inaccuracies as
possible, and ran a number of regressions and other analyses to see if any
patterns appeared. If you’ve spent any time on statistical research, you
already know that there are problems with self-reported data (people lie) and
correlational data (correlation does not equal causation, no matter how good
your math is), but the researchers in this case weren’t looking for a causal
relationship in this case…
According to the report, the
researchers were attempting to determine if there was any relationship between elaborate weddings and/or rings and the length or success
of the marriages, specifically because the companies that supply wedding
services and supplies have claimed for most of the last seventy years or so
that such expenditures are critical if you want to have a successful marriage.
They specifically note in their literature review that these marketing claims
are a recent development, and prior to World War II advertising of this type
was highly unusual, and there does not appear to have been any corresponding
popular belief…
Even more to the point, what
the study found was that there was no such relationship. According to the data
they collected, the researchers were unable to find any support for more
expensive weddings or accessories leading to longer or more successful
marriages. Although they did notice a number of other interesting results,
as far as this study can determine, there is no reason to believe that spending
a lot of money on your wedding will help you stay married, and no reason to
believe that failing to do so will doom your relationship to divorce. If you
dig down into the information, this turns out to be a moderately interesting
study of changing consumer economics over the last two or three generations
that debunks claims made by a specific industry about the vital importance of
their products and services…
Although we should probably concede
that just coming out and saying that would make it much less likely that anyone
would read a news article about the findings…
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