Although legislators hoping to restrict divorce say it hurts children and that too many parents divorce too casually, researchers have yet to reach any definitive conclusions.
"The research is just a mess," said Richard Weissbourd, a specialist in children's issues at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "There is research out there that can support almost any position on divorce."
Likening the situation to a food fight, a group of academic researchers founded the Council on Contemporary Families in Washington, D.C., last fall. Its aim is to counter widely publicized anti-divorce research from the New York-based Institute for American Values with studies that address what families need, regardless of whether the parents are married.
Social scientists disagree even about why the debate is occurring now, when divorce has leveled off and slightly declined. Some contend that the anti-divorce movement represents a cultural shift toward traditional values, others that it is a response to new norms.
Part of the conflict concerns the research itself, characterized by a mix of methods and measures, small or unrepresentative samples, and the fact that human passions are involved: Researchers, who possess varying degrees of awareness about how their own opinions influence the result, are often interviewing volunteers who possess varying degrees of willingness or ability to talk about their personal lives.
Legislators with established agendas are widely acknowledged to pick and choose whatever study or survey best supports their proposals. And some family law judges, making custody decisions, fall back on their own experience when faced with competing and legitimate experts.
"Everyone is upset now and hunting for new answers," said Ira Lurvey, former head of the family law section of the American Bar Assn., who is organizing a joint venture with the American Psychological Assn. for a new think tank on marriage and divorce.
In fact, the overall findings of divorce research have never been clear-cut. Although most of it describes harmful consequences for children, usually the trouble is neither severe nor long-lasting.
"The conservatives will look at that and say the evidence is clear that divorce is bad for kids. People on the left will say the effects are very weak for most kids, so what are we getting so worked up about? It's the oversimplification of the story that's the problem," said University of Nebraska researcher Paul Amato, co-author of a recent quantitative report on family breakdown, "A Generation at Risk."
