If the study were better designed, people would have been assigned at random to take the drug or not take drug. They wouldn't get to choose. That way, the two groups would, on the average, have the same initial scores on happiness and everything else. That's one of the hallmarks of respectable experimental research. A more rigorous study also would have assigned pills that looked the same to all of the participants. No one would know until after the study was over whether they had actually taken Shamster or a placebo that just looked like Shamster. That's important. If the drug company had blanketed the media with ads about the wonders of Shamster, people taking it might report greater happiness just because they knew that Shamster was supposed to make them feel that way.
In my hypothetical example, though, the scientists do make their bold and reckless claim. What's more, many other teams of scientists develop an interest in Shamster, and they conduct the same sort of flawed study. Not all of the teams get results identical to the first team's, but often the patterning is similar. Eventually, there are so many Shamster studies out there that you could write a book about it. So of course, some people did. Among them were one of the scientists who conducted Shamster studies and a columnist who always did like the idea of Shamster. Together, they reviewed a number of the studies that, in their opinion, made Shamster look good. The called their book, The Case for Shamster: Why People Taking Shamster are Happier and Healthier.
If the study I just described really had been a drug study, no respectable medical journal would ever publish it. No scientists worth their salt would want their names associated with it. Anyone writing a book with such a shameless and misleading title could kiss their credibility good-bye.
Yet this is just what much of the research on married and single people looks like. The study I described is one that actually has been conducted, much as I detailed it - 2200 participants from 48 states. I will call it the One-Time Happiness Study. The numbers in the table really are the results from the 2200 participants who answered exactly the question about their happiness that I described earlier. (The actual scientists, though, were more appropriately cautious about their conclusions.)
In the hypothetical study, I changed the names of the four groups. Here again is the same table, this time with the actual group names added to it.
3.3 Drug (Currently married)
3.2 No drug (Always single)
2.9 No drug - intolerable (Divorced) 2.9 No drug - withdrawn (Widowed)
When you hear claims about the latest study showing that married people are better off than unmarried people, you are probably learning about a study like this one. There would be nothing wrong with saying, on the basis of the data in the table above, that people who are currently married are, on average, happier than people who are currently unmarried - as long as you also made it clear that the biggest difference was between the currently married and the previously married, and that on a four point scale, the always-single group differed by just a tenth of a point from the currently married group. That would be a descriptive statement and accurate as far as it goes.
The enterprise becomes problematic when descriptive statements get recast as claims about the transformative power of marriage. When Linda Waite or Maggie Gallagher summarize a book full of results such as the ones in the table, and trumpet to the media the conclusion that marriage "makes" people happy or "improves" their lives or "is good for everyone," they are flat out wrong. Marriage was not good for the many people who could not stand it and divorced. In the end, perhaps it was not so good for the people who outlived their spouse. Even the married people who were skimmed off the top (the ones who never experienced divorce or the death of a spouse) ended up just a tad happier than people who had always been single.
To be fair, it is impossible to conduct perfectly rigorous scientific research on marriage. That's because it is impossible and unethical to assign people at random to be married or to stay single. It is also impossible to keep people unaware of whether they got the marriage drug or no drug. If you are married, you know it and if you are single, you know that; there is no placebo comparison group.
It is possible, though, to be clear and accurate in conveying the conclusions that can be supported scientifically by these studies. That's where the objectivity breaks down. The unsubstantiated claims are overwhelmingly ones that make marriage look better than it really is, and singlehood look worse.[END OF EXCERPT]
Later in that chapter, I explain the value of longitudinal studies (studies that follow the same people over time - for example, as they stay single, get married, or get unmarried). Those studies are better than studies of people at one point in time (the Shamster study) or studies of different groups of married and single people at different points in time (as in the study currently in the headlines). The very best studies methodologically, in which people are randomly assigned to marital status, are impossible to do.
Even if you've read just the brief excerpt I've posted here, maybe you can already tell what is wrong with the very first sentence of the press release about the recent study. Here it is: "For years, researchers have known that adults who have swapped rings say they are healthier than their never-married peers are."
I'll be back with my full analysis of that study (and the reports about it) soon.
