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THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF DIVORCE ARE STILL UNEQUAL: COMMENT ON PETERSON* Peterson (1996) undertook the difficult task of trying to reconstruct a segment of the Divorce Law Research data files to determine the accuracy of the datum on the gender gap in post-divorce standards of living I reported in The Divorce Revolution (Weitzman 1985). I congratulate him and thank him for this effort because I myself tried to track down or recreate the project's original data files used in my book. Unfortunately, these files do not exist. The two files now stored at the Murray Center are a "dirty data" raw data file and a mismatched SPSS system file, as I explain below.
In this limited space I address three issues raised by Peterson's article: (1) I explain what happened to the original data files, what I tried to do to make them usable, and the results. (2) I hope to put in perspective the 73/42 percent datum that Peterson focuses on. It is one statistic in a 500-page book. In any case, The Divorce Revolution did not win scholarly awards or attention because of the magnitude of that single statistic. What was unique was the analysis of how specific features of the law (in action) were creating a major social problem. (3) I note that the policy impact of The Divorce Revolution was not caused by the magnitude of the reported gap, but by the fact that disparities between former husbands and wives were being created by a legal system pledged to equality.
First, let me begin with Peterson's implied question: Was this responsible research and did I meet professional standards in analyzing these data? My research was supported by substantial grants from NSF and NIMH and I worked with a scientific advisory board that included experts in social science methodology. The data collection was subcontracted to the UCLA Survey Research Center which did the interviews (in 1978), coded the data, and subjected them to a rather elaborate verification and retrieval procedure. Such procedures are typical with survey data on income and economic issues...