糾正：我國離婚率錯報20年
[ 2007-01-26 10:03 ]
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我國的離婚率被人為翻了一番，并且這一統計錯誤足足延續了近20年。近日，在上海學者的呼吁下，該錯誤終于在2006年版的《中國統計年鑒》中得到了糾正。據上海社科院社會學研究所研究員徐安琪介紹，聯合國編纂的權威辭典和我國出版的《人口學辭典》都將離婚數規定為“離婚對數”或“件數”
，即一對夫妻離婚，離婚數計作“1”。但我國的操作部門把‘件數’與‘人數’等同了起來，結果明明是1件離婚，統計時被當成了2件。
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In
2005, the country's divorce rate was 2.76 per 1,000 people.
For last year, the figure is likely to be 1.3.
A sudden outbreak of conjugal
conviviality?
Actually, it is more like the old one about lies and statistics.
For years, the official divorce rate released by the National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS) was calculated based on the number of divorcees.
To the discomfiture of many in the country, the rate was uncomfortably close
to the 3.7 in the United States and higher than around 2 in Japan and South
Korea.
Now, to their relief, the picture will be set right by basing the figure on
the number of divorced couples instead of divorcees, an internationally-followed
practice.
According to official figures, there were 1.61 million divorced couples last
year; and according to the new method of computation, the divorce rate for the
year should be 1.3 per 1,000.
If the calculations were
extrapolated to 2005, the figure would have been 1.38 instead of
2.76.
The statistical correction came about thanks to the unstinting efforts of Xu Anqi, a senior researcher
at the Marriage and Family Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
For years, she waged a lone battle to get the "mistake" corrected.
She started to correspond with various organizations such as the NBS, the
Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Supreme People's Court from the 1990s but many
officials thought the wrong calculation would not cause any trouble, she said.
"I strongly disagreed with them. Based on the wrong statistics, many
sensational research reports came out. For example, some even suggested that the
divorce rate in China had surpassed that in the United States."
She said that many UN and internationally-renowned research institutes used
the official statistics, which caused a lot of international misunderstanding
about marriage in China.
Her efforts have yielded result and the 2006 Yearbook of Population Studies,
to be released soon, will finally use the correct method of calculation.
He Feng, a gender studies researcher at Fudan University, said: "Xu's effort
is crucial to sociological studies. We always do a lot of horizontal comparisons
of statistics between China and other countries. We should live up to global standards."
（Agencies）
Vocabulary:
conjugal
conviviality：幸福婚姻
extrapolate：推斷
unstinting
efforts：不懈努力，無私奉獻
live up to global
standards：符合國際標準
（英語點津陳蓓編輯） |
