What are the rates of marital infidelity in western nations?

February 5, 2004 7:35 AM

Can anyone point me to information about rates of marital infidelity in western nations? I'm particularly interested in the United States, but figures on other first world nations would provide interesting material for comparison.
posted by Irontom to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

from this paper (which has some relevant data in the tables) it seems you want the GSS (general social survey). this site probably has the data somewhere.
posted by andrew cooke at 7:57 AM on February 5, 2004

this looks useful too.
posted by andrew cooke at 7:59 AM on February 5, 2004

Response by poster: Okay - I dug around. The GSS only asked about fidelity in the 91 and 93 surveys.

14.6% of married people surveyed admitted to cheating in 1991.

16.5% admitted it in 1993.

Does anyone else have any other info/data/links?
posted by Irontom at 11:54 AM on February 5, 2004

hmmm. i wonder what the correlation is between answers from husband and wife? if it's always only one half that cheats (unlikely, admittedly) and the cheats are distributed evenly between the sexes then that's 30% of marriages with infidelities... :o/
posted by andrew cooke at 12:05 PM on February 5, 2004

Response by poster: with more work, I guess I could pull gender out of the extracts, but I dont have time right now

i guess I was hoping for some kind of summary piece - the one my Google-fu is currently not finding
posted by Irontom at 12:19 PM on February 5, 2004