Methodological note: The Quartz break up calculator ™ is based on data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey, which, starting in 2009, interviewed US couples about their relationships, then brought them back at about one, two, and five years after that to interview them again. (If a member of a couple died, they were excluded from the dataset.) Not all the follow-up interviews took place at exactly one, two, or three years after the first, so those numbers are approximations, and the one-year, two-year, and five-year breakup probabilities were derived from a simple statistical model. 1
The questions we chose for the calculator are those that the Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld found were predictive of couples staying together using this same dataset (pdf). Rosenfeld was not involved in creating the calculator.
It’s Breakup Week at Quartz! Here are more stories on breakups, breaking up, and heartbreak:
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