Sociologists at NYU say that a person’s height can help determine how likely they are to get a divorce later in life.
For their study, researchers sought to determine how certain social and physical factors influenced a person’s likelihood of divorce. To do this, researchers looked at data from 4,500 families over a 16-year span. Some of the factors they analyzed included:
• Height.
• Height, compared to their significant other.
• Income.
• Education.
Men were classified as short, average or tall based on their height. Short was classified as being less than 66 inches in up until 2009, when the number changed to 67 inches. Men were considered tall if they were at least 73 inches, and that categorization was again raised an inch in 2009. Average men fell between the two listed heights.
Height Results
Some of the insights the researchers collected from the data include:
• Short men tended to marry later in life than average or tall men, but they were 32 percent less likely to divorce.
• Tall men were more likely to marry women close to their age with a higher education.
• Short men were more likely to marry younger women.
• Short men were more likely to make a greater amount of money than their spouse compared to tall men, whose income level tended to be closer to that of their spouse.
Researchers stopped short of declaring a causal relationship between height and divorce likelihood, and they noted that the findings do not represent all couples. Instead, they concluded by saying that socioeconomic status and physical features are just a few of many traits that could lead a couple to seek a divorce.
“Marriage and divorce have implications for socioeconomic stratification and asset accumulation, our observed effects suggest that men’s height may indirectly affect their economic status and socioeconomic mobility through these demographic processes.”
Related source: Huffington Post
