ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, May 17, 1996 TAG: 9605170059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHARINE WEBSTER ASSOCIATED PRESS BOSTON
LAWS WERE CHANGED on the basis of Lenore Weitzman's research. Trouble is, her figures were all wet.
It was a jaw-dropping statistic, widely influential in the movement to change America's divorce and child-support laws.
Eleven years ago, sociologist Lenore J. Weitzman published ``The Divorce Revolution,'' her groundbreaking study of California's no-fault divorce system. In it, she reported that women's households suffered a 73 percent drop in their standard of living in the first year after divorce, while men's households enjoyed a 42 percent rise.
Since then, the figures have been quoted hundreds of times in newspapers, politicians' speeches and court rulings.
There's only one problem: Her figures are wrong.
Richard R. Peterson, a New York sociologist who reanalyzed Weitzman's data from computer and paper records, found a 27 percent decline in women's post-divorce standard of living and a 10 percent increase in men's - still a serious gap, but not the catastrophic one Weitzman saw.
Weitzman, a professor of sociology and law at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., now acknowledges her figures were wrong. She blames the loss of her original computer data file, a weighting error or a mistake in the computer calculations performed by a Stanford University research assistant.
Peterson went back and checked Weitzman's conclusions because they were so much at odds with what other researchers had found and because they conflicted with some of her own data.
Peterson's research and Weitzman's response will be published in the American Sociological Review next month.
The dispute over Weitzman's standard-of-living figures is more than just academic.
A search of the Nexis database found more than 175 newspaper and magazine stories citing Weitzman's numbers. Peterson said he also found citations in 348 social science articles, 250 law review articles and 24 appeals and Supreme Court cases. The statistic even appeared in President Clinton's 1996 budget.
Weitzman's figures have been cited by policy-makers and others as hard evidence of what's become known as the ``feminization of poverty.'' And her book is credited with helping bring about stricter child-support enforcement and more flexible property-division laws around the country.
Moreover, in a recent essay, Susan Faludi, feminist author of ``Backlash,'' called Weitzman's statistic ``the centerpiece for recent attacks on no-fault divorce.''
Weitzman's study, which looked at divorces in Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978, was designed to evaluate California's first-in-the-nation no-fault divorce law.
Because Weitzman's findings varied so dramatically from what other researchers had found, many analysts concluded that the bigger gap in California was caused by that state's switch to no-fault.
But Weitzman, her critics and other divorce scholars say no-fault divorce is not to blame for some women's economic plight. Peterson says research on fault-based and no-fault systems has found similar gaps - about a 30 percent drop in women's standard of living and a 10 percent rise in men's.
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