In a recent article in this journal James White (1987) concluded that premarital cohabitation has a positive effect on subsequent marital stability among Canadian women. He based this conclusion on results of an analysis of data from the Family History Survey conducted by Statistics Canada in 1984. This finding aroused our interest because other analysts...using data from the Canadian Fertility Survey also conducted in 1984 reached the opposite conclusion; they found that premarital cohabitation raised the subsequent risk of marital dissolution by about 50%....Therefore we set out to discover whether the divergent findings for Canadians were due to differences in the data or differences in methodology. We discovered that White had inadvertently made a methodological error an error so severe that his conclusions are without any substantive meaning. The purpose of our comment is twofold: (a) to correct the erroneous substantive finding by White that premarital cohabitation enhances subsequent marital stability and (b) to provide methodological guidance to those who wish to use logistic regression to analyze event histories. A reply by James White is also included (pp. 540-4). (EXCERPT)
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