why does spread not show up on separation studio 4

This “offspring” cohort is re-examined about every four years.įor those unfamiliar with the concept “degrees of separation,” here’s a short primer: individuals with direct social ties to you-your friends, children, parents and siblings are one degree of separation removed to you. In 1971, a second generation was added to the original study group when researchers enrolled 5,124 of the original participants’ adult children and their spouses.

Researchers interviewed 5,209 men and women between the ages of 30 and 62 in Framingham, located 20 miles west of Boston and today home to 67,000 people.Ībout every two years the subjects are re-interviewed and undergo a detailed medical history, physical examination, and laboratory tests. The project began in 1948 to study the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. McDermott and her colleagues base their findings on the data collected in the Framingham Heart Study, one of the country’s longest-running and most influential longitudinal surveys (longitudinal surveys follow the same groups of people over time). A research team in Arkansas tracked how obesity appeared to spread in elementary school classrooms. Economist Ilyana Kuziemko reported in a 2006 paper titled “Is Having Babies Contagious?” that brothers and sisters are significantly more likely to have a child soon after a sibling gives birth. Sociologists call the phenomenon “social contagion”-the spread of information, attitudes and behaviors through friends, families and other social networks.Įxamples of social contagion run the gamut from adolescent sexual behavior to the spread of phantom diseases in a workplace. “The contagion of divorce can spread through a social network like a rumor, affecting friends up to two degrees removed.”

“Approaching the epidemiology of divorce from the perspective of an epidemic may be apt in more ways than one,” McDermott and her colleagues wrote in a forthcoming article in the journal Social Forces. So divorce is contagious…and you can catch the divorce bug from your friends-even from a friend of a friend? McDermott and her colleagues found that study participants were 75% more likely to become divorced if a friend is divorced and 33% more likely to end their marriage if a friend of a friend is divorced. As if married people don’t have enough to worry about, a new study suggests that the divorce of a friend or close relative dramatically increases the chances that you too will divorce.Ī research team headed by Rose McDermott of Brown University analyzed three decades of data on marriage, divorce and remarriage collected from thousands of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts.

Why does spread not show up on separation studio 4