Data from the National Survey of Families and Households contains lots of explicit and implicit information about infidelity. Here's a reference that distills a small amount of that information (for those of you with online journal access, the paper is available through JSTOR):

Sweeney, Megan M. and Allan V. Horwitz. Infidelity, Initiation, and the Emotional Climate of Divorce: Are There Implications for Mental Health? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 42, no. 3 (Sep. 2001), 295-309.

GC

Sounds interesting. Could you post part of it at least? I have no access to that journal.

I found the abstract on PubMed. Basically it is just saying that when infidelity is involved, depression is DECREASED upon divorce, when it is not, depression is increased.:

J Health Soc Behav. 2001 Sep;42(3):295-309. Related Articles, Links


Infidelity, initiation, and the emotional climate of divorce: are there implications for mental health?

Sweeney MM, Horwitz AV.

Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 264 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

A large literature has examined the role of "secondary" stressors, such as problems with finances, social support, residential mobility, and children, in producing the well-documented association between divorce and a variety of psychopathological conditions. Much less attention, however, has been paid to variation in the "primary" disruption experience. We address this omission using data from the National Survey of Families and Households to investigate the interrelationships among depression, initiator status, and spousal infidelity. While we find little evidence of direct effects of initiator status or spousal infidelity on post-divorce depression, the importance of these characteristics emerges when they are considered in an interactive context. Specifically, while divorce initiation is associated with reduced depression among individuals with unfaithful spouses, initiation is associated with increased depression in the absence of spousal infidelity. Taken together, our findings suggest that characteristics of the divorce experience may interact in complex ways to produce variation in mental health outcomes.

PMID: 11668775 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query...l=pubmed_docsum

There is not enough coffee in the WORLD to make that logical this early in the morning. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/eek.gif" alt="" />lol

Dont they know how to speak plain Texan? Can somebody put this in normal words please?? <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Katie

Mel, your interpretation is wrong. They say depression is less likely for a BS who pursues divorce. Here's the abstract:


The survey data are a national sample of about 10,000 people. They were first interviewed in 1987-88 and interviewed again in 1992-94.

Here's one:

"Because of suspected severe under-reporting in the respondents' reports of their own extramarital relationships, we do not attempt to construct a parallel measure for infidelity among... primary respondents."

i.e., they don't try to determine the likelihood of depression among wayward spouses who divorce, because a wayward spouse tends to lie when asked if he was having an affair when his previous marriage ended. About 15% of divorced survey respondents admitted that they were having affairs when their marriages ended, but about 40% of divorced respondents reported that their ex-spouses were having affairs. Similar numbers for both men and women.

I've looked at the NSFH myself. It's sort of a gold mine. I wish I had time to mine the data. It'd be fun.

GC

[no coffee here either]

Uh... stbxh's As were over by the time I found out. We couldn't rebuild because I had a hard time accepting WH's As and two years later, we D'd because he couldn't take that I was so, so angry all the time.

Do I fall under the bs with infidelity or bs without?

This study only examines the likelihood of depression for people who, when interviewed in 1992-94, were no longer married to the partners they had in 1987-88.

Looking just at BS depression...

Take two people who pursued divorce. Say one was the BS, and the other was not (of course, the other did not necessarily cheat). The former BS was less likely to be depressed in the first five years after the divorce.

Now take two people who were divorced but did not initiate the divorce, one a BS, the other not. The former BS is almost three times as likely to be depressed in those first five years after divorce as the one who was not cheated on.

The non-initiating BS is clearly the most likely to be depressed in the first five years after divorce.

GC

RN, I think the survey would pick you up. I'm pretty sure there are survey questions asking if the former spouse was unfaithful not only at the time of the divorce, but previously as well.

For the study we're talking about, you'd fall into another category. The NSFH data are used in lots and lots of studies. Anybody can get the data, but pinning down different circumstances can be tricky.

For instance, in the five years between the first and the second "waves" of the survey, a few people divorced, remarried, divorced, and remarried again.

To be sure, a small number, but yikes. Just imagine.

GC

Of course... the BS did not want (and therefore did not initiate) the divorce. The one who's been dumped... is in the dumps!

That one is a big DUH... except both people in that example got dumped. One got cheated on, the other just got dumped.

The finding that BS who initiate divorce are less likely to be depressed than non-BS who initiate divorce shouldn't come as a huge surprise either.

GC

Thanks for the clarification, graycloud. I sure would like to see the survey.

The survey data are a tough knot to unravel.

There was also a "wave 3" survey in 2001-03. I don't think divorced participants were asked about the circumstances of their former spouses, which might have been interesting.

Someone oughta do a dissertation.

GC