Till Porn Do Us Part? A Longitudinal Examination of Pornography Use and Divorce

Abstract

As pornography use becomes more commonplace in the United States, and increasingly so among younger cohorts, a growing literature is considering its potential connection to key social and cultural institutions. The current study examined the relationship between pornography use and one such institution: marriage. We drew on three-wave longitudinal data from 2006 to 2014 General Social Survey panel studies to determine whether married Americans’ pornography use predicted their likelihood of divorce over time and under what social conditions. We employed a doubly robust strategy that combines entropy balancing with logistic regression models. We found that the probability of divorce roughly doubled for married Americans who began pornography use between survey waves (N = 2,120; odds ratio = 2.19), and that this relationship held for both women and men. Conversely, discontinuing pornography use between survey waves was associated with a lower probability of divorce, but only for women. Additional analyses also showed that the association between beginning pornography use and the probability of divorce was particularly strong among younger Americans, those who were less religious, and those who reported greater initial marital happiness. We conclude by discussing data limitations, considering potential intervening mechanisms and the possibility of reverse causation, and outlining implications for future research.

Notes

¹ The GSS is collected by the National Opinion Research Center with funding from the National Science Foundation. The GSS is built on an equal-probability multistage cluster sample of households for the entire United States. In 2006, the GSS began a three-wave rotating panel design to accompany their ongoing cross-sectional data collection strategy, and this study made use of these distinct panel data. Both the GSS cross-sectional data and the GSS panels are publicly available and can be downloaded from http://gss.norc.org/get-the-data. For additional information concerning the GSS data and data collection procedures, see http://gss.norc.org/Get-Documentation.

² As a robustness check, we ran fixed-effects models on our data to see if we could capture an association between change in porn viewership and change in divorce status in this less focused approach. We were able to capture significant differences in the association between change in porn viewership and change in divorce status. Though the associations were marginal (p < .07), we believe the main reason for this is the overall lack of within-individual variation on divorce in this panel. Our approach enjoys the benefits of fixed-effects models without the drawback of requiring greater within-individual variation.