Mormons and Infidelity

Posted on February 20, 2012
Filed Under Religion | 5 Comments

At some blog discussions last week someone had mentioned the incidence of cheating in society at large and among the Mormon community. Now measuring this is tricky business and you really don’t get terribly similar rates from different studies. Part of the problem is that cheating is such a socially frowned upon practice that there is a lot of incentive not to confess to it. Even in polls.

The National AIDS Behavioral study was attempting to discern how prevalent risky behaviors were in the United States. It found that

Of 1686 married respondents living across the United States, 2.2% reported extramarital sex; of 3827 married respondents living in 23 urban areas with large Hispanic or African-American populations, 2.5% reported having sexual partners outside marriage.

An other popularly quoted study is the Atkins one. It primarily accessed the GSS data. Fortunately with the GSS data we can compare Mormon vs. non-Mormon rates of infidelity as Mormonism was a category in the data set.

The below comes from figures posted at The Inductivist. I should note that I had looked at the raw data myself in the past. The survey for Mormons had a sample size of 44 people and so the actual rate isn’t that reasonably significant but at least gives a ball park figure. (I’ve made mistakes in the past doing GSS data mining forgetting to see what n is for the Mormon population in question)

The percent of people who grew up Mormon (i.e. no converts, but not necessarily still Mormon) who ever cheated on a spouse was 4.5%. The percentage of non-Mormons who ever cheated on a spouse was 17.6%. Interestingly the Inductivist does the analysis for married born-again Christians and it is 16.5%.

Now I’m not sure the GSS is the best way to get at this data. And as I mentioned the small n means that the Mormon figures don’t tell us that much. It is interesting.

 

 

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Comments

5 Responses to “Mormons and Infidelity”

Wow, that is very interesting. Nice to see we are 1/4 of non-mormons. I would be even more interested if they could somehow screen by people who say they they were married in the temple.

I say this because, a few studies back in 1993, 2000 and 2000 found divorce among LDS people is the lowest of all study social groups and is down around 5-6% and for those who were married outside the temple it was like 40%!!!: http://www.adherents.com/largecom/lds_dem.html

So I wonder, is 4.5% of mormons cheat on their spouse, I wonder if you separated “got married in the temple from didn’t” that the percentage would be significantly lower like divorce was found to be.

Well be careful – note the sample size. So there’s a lot more error in that figure.

I’ve seen the 40% figure and I’m pretty skeptical of it. But as I said this is an area where you get a pretty ridiculous range of figures.

First, the GSS has Mormon data? I’ve used it before but haven’t ever seen a Mormon category, is it new?

Also, I think any statement of this type with a very low n-value needs to include standard errors. The n-value might be big enough to do a simple regression using dummy variables for Mormon, evangelical, and non-Mormon.

GSS has always had Mormon data. But often the sample size is too small to be meaningful. A sample size of 44 for this one is actually bigger than normal. But with that we have at best an illustrative effect but not a number I’d want to quote too much.

5 John Mansfield on February 29th, 2012 6:18 am

As you say, Clark, it’s a difficult thing to measure. If a survey contacts a philanderer, he/she has no way to know it truly is an anonymous survey and not some detective or friend hired by the spouse. It’s about as useful a question as asking if the respondent ever stole $10,000 or more.

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