FOR: Kim Woods - Research Paper

FOR RESULTS SECTION OF PAPER My research hypothesis was that a person's overall happiness in their marriage affects their thought on if divorce is the best option.  That might seem like a weird question and one may think “if they are happy they will not have any marital problems”.  I dove into that question because I look at people who say they are generally happy in their marriage, but then there is infidelity or excessive drinking, etc.  My thought was is a couple more able to work through those big issues if they were friends and happy otherwise. 

Divbest v. Hapmar

With respect to the DV: divbest and the crosstabs calculated, I find that the people who strongly agree, who are happy, that divorce is the best option when a couple is having marital problems is 4.6% and those that strongly agree, who are not happy, is .4.   However, the people who agree, calculated by taking the 24.4% and subtracting the 1.1%, leaving us with 23.3%; the people who disagree, calculated by taking 16.9% and subtracting the 1.1%; and those that strongly disagree, calculated by taking 63.3% and subtracting the 3.2% indicate that the epsilon has not been met and, therefore, would warrant further statistical analysis.  I would then recommend breaking the study down further and finding the IVs for: age, if the person has any children and if the person has ever been divorced.

With respect to the IV:  hapmar and the crosstabs calculated, I find a totally different scenario.  For the people who are very happy the percentage is 4.6%, when I subtract the 8.0%, I then get a negative of 3.4.  For those that are pretty happy and not too happy, I find the same result, being 0%.  Therefore, these statistics would not warrant further statistical analysis. 

This part must be in here – word for word: The group of people who agree that divorce is the best solution to marital issues (58.8 %) are the least likely to indicate they are happiest in their marriage.  As for those that disagree, (63.8%) comes in third, somewhat in the middle, on their happiness level.   Lastly, those that neither agree, nor disagree (60.9%) indicate they are happy in their marriage.

Overall, of the people who stated they were very happy in their marriage, 80.4 disagree that divorce is the best option when there are marital issues.  This tells me that they are happy, for the most part, and are willing to do what it takes to avoid going down the road to divorce.   Further, of those that stated they were not happy in their marriage, 5.4%, they stated that they strongly agree with divorce as the best option when there are marital issues.  This makes perfect sense.   If they are not happy to begin with, then there are marital issues, whatever they may be, the will to try is not very strong.