Thread. Writing for @TheAtlantic, @olgakhazan has a great write-up of my latest blog post for @FamStudies, including responses from well-known family scholars @AndrewCherlin & @familyunequal. theatlantic.com/health/archive…
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The findings show that people who only have one (or zero) premarital sex partners are more likely to have happy marriages than are folks with lengthier sexual biographies. After one partner, the differences are mostly trivial (& not statistically significant).
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Here's the effect size in context: it's larger than the boost to marital happiness provided by a college degree, a higher income, or regular church attendance. It's smaller than the relationship between race & marital happiness.
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More broadly, it's important to recognize that the majority of married Americans describe their relationships as "very happy," no matter how many sex partners they've had.
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I offer multiple qualifications about the data and data analysis. Scientists should do this as a matter of course.
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The research brief offers another finding that's surprising people: ~40% of survey respondents report just one (or 0) sex partners at marriage, a surprisingly low number.
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I'm inclined to take this 40% figure seriously, because I obtained an almost identical result for the same marriage cohorts from a different data set, the National Survey of Family Growth: ifstudies.org/blog/counterin…
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This 40% finding no longer holds for people married after the start of the new millennium--it's declined to ~27% (it's too soon to tell for more recent years).
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More broadly, most Americans don't have a lot of sex partners. The median woman has had 4; the median man, between 4 & 6. & those numbers are irrespective of sexual orientation: ifstudies.org/blog/nine-deca…
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Male promiscuity has decreased over time; female promiscuity has become more common.
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Funny story. @mandystadt wrote a great article about my sex partners & divorce research for @TheCut: thecut.com/2016/06/whats-…
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After that story, I got a call from New York magazine asking me to redo my analysis with a top category of 50+ partners, rather than 10+. I explained to them that only 0.4% of the population had 50+ partners, & the sample was too small for data analysis.
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50 is a number that makes sense to those of us in big urban enclaves, but we're not like most of the rest of America. But we don't know this because of what we see on TV.
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Finally, I'm always amused when people describe my research as conservative, as I'm a lifelong liberal: huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-im-a…
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I broadly believe data support a progressive worldview, but that doesn't mean the world is entirely as we see it. I'll never fail to report data because they don't accord with my beliefs. That's one reason why I'm a member of @HdxAcademy.
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