Financial Problems and Divorce

Virtually no studies exist that support the still popular belief that financial problems are the number one cause of divorce. Recent studies have found financial problems to be poor predictors of divorce. This study investigated the effect of selected demographic characteristics on the relationship between financial problems and divorce for individuals who were in their first marriages. Discriminant analysis techniques were used to analyze the data. Although all of the discriminant functions were statistically significant, the demographic and financial-problem variables generated no meaningful predictive power. That is, the variables used in this study were not useful in discriminating the divorced from the nondivorced.