by Alistair Thompson, TCW
A LANDMARK study has exposed a ‘systemic underestimation’ of the importance of marriage in the UK, challenging the foundation of government social policy over the last quarter of a century.
The report from the Marriage Foundation contradicts established thinking on the importance of the institution in family policy by demonstrating that marriage is a primary driver of family stability. The findings run counter to academic claims that the ‘marriage gap’ is merely a result of income and education.
The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution by Dr Harry Benson, research director of the Marriage Foundation, and published in partnership the Centre for Social Justice, finds that couples who marry before the conception of their first child are half as likely to split up as couples who do not wed, accounting for more than half of the stability gap between parents.
It identifies a ‘major methodological limitation’ in previous influential studies that defined government policy, discounting the importance of marriage, to just one of many types of relationship, falsely claiming that the difference was due to other factors. For much of this time, UK policy has been guided by a studies from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) suggesting married parents stay together longer only because they are ‘older, better educated and better off’.
Dr Benson’s research systematically debunks their conclusions and exposes that their findings rested on analysing only three-quarters of the available survey sample. By using state-of-the-art ‘multiple imputation’ to restore missing data and analysing the full representative sample of 3,324 couples over 14 years, the new report reveals a significant ‘marriage effect’ that persists regardless of socio-economic background, race, religion, education, region and dozens of other controlling factors.
‘The benefits of marriage have been systematically underestimated in academic research and public policy,’ says Dr Benson in his report. ‘Their [the IFS] conclusions rest on a major methodological flaw: analysing only three quarters of parents in their survey sample.