Divorce Among Physicians-Reply

In Reply.—  Dr Hojat's criticism would be telling if we had not compared physicians with other professionals, such as lawyers, who presumably also marry later than average. As we reported, physicians had lower divorce proportions than most other professionals. Furthermore, if age at marriage were a crucial factor in occupational divorce rates, then one would expect well-educated professionals (who tend to postpone marriage longer than less-educated workers) to have lower divorce proportions in general than the rest of the employed population. On the contrary, we found that male professionals were no different in divorce rates than the rest of the employed population. We conclude that our findings are not an artifact of differences in age at marriage.We concur with Dr Hojat that the cohort approach is the ideal way to determine occupation-specific divorce rates. To our knowledge, however, such occupational cohort data do not exist. We believe that the