Maine Has Unusually High Divorce Rate, But Why?

Josie Huang

MPBN.net

According to the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of Maine women are currently divorced, compared to the national average of 12 percent, and 12 percent of Maine men are currently divorced, compared to nine percent nationally. Why one state would have a higher divorce rate than another remains a bit of a mystery. "When it came to divorce, per se, we didn't find too many correlations," says Paul Taylor, who directs Pew's Social and Demographics Trends project. "We were able to correlate high levels of divorce with the tendency of residents in the state to marry young, and there was a correlation there." Residents in Maine, however, don't marry young compared to folks in other states. The median age for Maine women to marry is 29; for men, it's 27 -- in both cases, a year older than the national average.

So there are other factors at play. But what are they? "The issue is more about the working-class composition of the Maine population," says Brad Wilcox, who is with the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Wilcox, who is also an Associate Professor of Sociology, says working-class people are more vulnerable to divorce. Many Mainers fall into that cateogry. Mainers make less money than people living elsewhere in the Northeast. In addition, the percentage of Mainers with college degrees is less than the national average.

Source: http://www.mpbn.net/News/MaineNews/tabid/181/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3475/ItemId/9490/Default.aspx#