Executive Summary

March 2004

Family disintegration has long been known to produce negative effects on children,

adults, communities and societies. Communities and societies are healthier and more productive

when the proportion of intact families is higher (Doherty et al. 2002). Numerous private,

professional, religious, and government agencies have tackled this problem with more vigor in

recent years. Coalitions of such agencies, referred to as Community Marriage Initiatives, have

emerged as one of the major thrusts. This report summarizes a study being published in the

Family Relations journal.

One of the earliest of such endeavors was the Marriage Savers program (see Parke &

Ooms, 2002), launched in 1986 by founder Mike McMannus with a group of concerned faith

community leaders in Modesto, California. The premise was that a large majority of marriages

occur in church settings (83% according to Hart, 2003), and that religious leaders should be more

involved in strengthening marriage in their congregations. By January, 2004, the clergy of 183

cities and towns in 40 states had adopted a Community Marriage Policy® (CMP) with the

laudable goal of reducing divorce rates among those married in area churches. Most of these

were created after 1996 when McMannus formed the non-profit organization, Marriage Savers,

which helps clergy organize CMPs. The question for researcher Stan E. Weed and his

colleagues at the Institute for Research and Evaluation was whether or not this strategy really

made any difference. And how could one develop a credible answer to that question? With

funding support from the Department of Justice, through the National Fatherhood Initiative, the

researchers set out to address those questions.

The Program

What is a Community Marriage Policy, what does it do, and how does it operate at the

local level? Most Community Marriage Policies involve local clergy developing a community

marriage policy in which they pledge, publicly and in writing, to take five steps to revitalize

marriage:

• Require rigorous marriage preparation of at least four months during which couples

take a premarital inventory and talk through the relational issues it surfaces with trained

mentor couples, who also teach couple communication skills.

• Renew existing marriages with an annual enrichment retreat.

• Restore troubled marriages by training couples whose marriages once nearly failed, to

mentor couples currently in crisis

• Reconcile the separated with a course conducted with a same gender support partner

• Revive step families by creating Step Family Support Groups for parents in

As implied in the above components, couples in healthy marriages are enlisted to be a

“mentor couple” to help others at critical stages of marriage. To date, about 3,000 mentor

couples have been personally trained by Mike and Harriet McMannus. Numerous others have

become involved through local congregational efforts.

Evaluation Challenges

Several challenges faced the researchers as they sought to address the questions of

program impact. First, and surprisingly, the Federal Government discontinued collecting divorce

data at the county level in the mid 1990s and stopped paying states to do so. As a result, the

researcher had to contact most states and individual counties directly in order to create a data

base for U.S. counties from 1989 to the present. In a few cases, the county data was not available

or not reliable, which meant that some CMP counties had to be excluded from the analysis. For

example, some states record filed divorces rather than finalized divorces. Second, information

about program implementation was not available from all CMP counties. We are sure, however,

that the level of implementation is wide ranging – from those counties who did little beyond the

original signing to those who followed the signing with a serious and lasting effort.

Furthermore, since national divorce rates are already declining in most U.S. counties, additional

research had to be done to assess the effect of community Marriage Policies in the context of that

overall decline, and program effects need to be assessed in the context of that existing decline.

In reality, the deck is stacked against finding a positive program effect. The effort

depends on local volunteers with a high turnover. Local pastors also change frequently. Impact

on county level data would require a fairly large proportions of congregations in that county

signing on, and program implementation varies widely in its quality. Training of mentor couples

CMP was signed, Marriage Savers

introduced its’ Manual to Create a Marriage Savers Congregation, an indication that the

program was still evolving and is relatively new. Recorded divorce rates lag considerably

behind the intervention, making divorce rate changes harder to detect in a relatively new

program. And, CMPs were adopted mostly at the city level but the data were only available at

the county level, embedding the effect in a larger population than that which would be affected

by the policy. Finding a significant program effect under these conditions would be surprising.

The Research Questions & Results

The first, simplest, and most direct question was whether the divorce rate decline was

greater after the CMP was signed than the existing decline before the signing. The researchers

examined divorce rates for five years before clergy signed Community Marriage Policies and up

to seven years after signing – in 114 communities in 122 counties. We measured the “slope” or

the annual decrease in the divorce rate over five years before the CMP was signed and found the

divorce rate was falling by .084 divorce rate point per year (that is, for example, from 5 divorces

per 1,000 people to 4.916.) Our first hypothesis was that the slope should accelerate after clergy

signed the CMP. In fact, that proved to be the case. The annual decline of the divorce rate

accelerated from .084 to .144, with the divorce decline slope dropping almost twice as fast on

average as before the Community Marriage Policies were signed.

A more rigorous test involved a comparison between counties having Community

Marriage Policies with matched counties in the same state who do not have such policies. The

Institute wanted to identify counties whose pre-CMP slope was most similar to that of CMP

counties. To do so, it was necessary to look at data from all 3,141 U.S. counties and select

virtually the same rate as the CMP counties prior to CMP signing. The divorce rate decline of

comparison counties in the pre-CMP years, on average, was .095 divorce points per year (vs.

.084 in CMP counties). Our second hypothesis was that the decline after the CMP was signed

would have accelerated more in counties which adopted a Community Marriage Policy than in

the comparison counties without the intervention. This hypothesis was also supported by the

data. As noted above, in CMP counties the divorce rate fell .084 before the CMP and .144

afterward. But in the matched counties, the slope of the divorce rate decline actually fell from

.095 per year to .06 per year. This is a statistically significant difference (b = -.095, p = .007, df =

1852). We concluded from this that the CMP counties were experiencing a greater decline in the

divorce rate than the comparison counties.

In more familiar terms, counties with a Community Marriage Policy® had an 8.6%

decline in their divorce rates over four years, while the comparison counties registered a 5.6%

decline. If those rates are projected for seven years, CMP communities enjoy a 17.5% decline in

the divorce rate vs. 9.4% in comparison counties. Thus, Community Marriage Policies counties

have a decline in the divorce rate that is nearly double that of control communities. The levels of

impact would likely be greater if more communities had higher levels of participation and

implementation – that is, if more churches and synagogues signed on and more mentor couples

trained.

The Institute estimates that 31,000 divorces are being avoided in 114 cities/counties with

a Community Marriage Policy. Since clergy and community leaders have now created 183

Community Marriage Policies, that number could be perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 marriages being

saved.

The contrast between the CMP cities/counties and matched counties can be seen in graph

below.

(Insert Figure 3 on page 40)

Alternative Explanations

basic conclusion that CMP counties showed a greater decline in the divorce rate than the

matched comparison counties. For example, we looked at factors which often predict divorce

rates to some degree, such as the percentage of the population which is Catholic (who tend to

experience lower divorce rates), percent urban, percent poverty, percent who cohabit, etc.

Controlling for these factors did not change the results. We also examined whether the marriage

rates were different in CMP counties compared to paired or control cities. No evidence could be

found that the observed differences in divorce were attributable to differentially changing

marriage rates. As Institute President Stan Weed told a reporter from his local paper, the Salt

Lake Tribune,

“We’ve looked at this data 100 different ways and the bottom line for us is that

a Community Marriage Policy signing and the related activities associated with it

bring down the divorce rate and creates a stronger culture for marriage.”

Conclusion

The overall effect is modest but statistically significant and promising. This effect is the

result of several (36 policies) doing quite well, another 29 showing weaker but positive results,

and the rest not doing better than their comparison counties. But on average, the policy counties

did better than the matched comparison counties. The simple explanation of the results is that

conclusion is further strengthened by the fact that numerous communities have adopted the

Policy at different points in time (from 1986 through 2000), and in geographically dispersed

areas of the country.

Lacking complete and accurate data on level and quality of implementation, we cannot

determine how much of the effect can be attributed to the Community Marriage Policies. What

we can say is that something is happening as a result of local community effort and initiative, the

approach looks promising, and further research is warranted to establish more specifically which

program components over what time period best account for reducing divorce rates. Local

communities with reasonable effort and good programs can make a difference in divorce rates.

Doherty, W.J., Galston, W.A., Glenn, N. D., Gottman, J., Markey, B., Markman, H.J., Nock, S.,

Popenoe, D., Rodriguez, G.C., Sawhill, I.V., Stanley, S.M., Waite, L.J.,

Wallerstein, J. (2002). Why marriage matters: Twenty one conclusions from the social

sciences. Institute for American Values. New York.

Parke, M. & Ooms, T. (2002). More than a dating service? State activities designed to

strengthen and promote marriage. Center for Law and Social Policy. Washington, D.C