New Study Examines Divorce Rates According to Occupation

If you are married to a dancer or choreographer, you may want to have the number of a good divorce lawyer handy. A new study that looks at divorce rates of certain occupations found that dancers have the highest divorce rate at 43.1 percent. If your main objective is to never get a divorce, consider marrying an engineer.

The study, conducted by Michael Aamodt, a professor at Radford University and consultant for DCI Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., was published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology. Aamodt started out to research the personalities of law enforcement officers, but found statistics on domestic lives by occupation hard to come by until he asked the Census Bureau to parse their data based on divorce and separation rates for 449 job categories.

The top three occupations with high divorce rates include the aforementioned dancers and choreographers, bartenders (38.4 percent) and massage therapists (38.2 percent). Also included in the top ten were casino workers, telephone operators, nurses and home health aides.

The occupations with the lowest divorce rates included three types of engineers, optometrists, clergy and podiatrists.

Aamodt said that the study probably raises more questions than it answers, since it does not reveal whether it’s the occupation that leads to divorce, or whether those drawn to a particular occupation are more disposed to be in unstable relationships.