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The following numbers 3.5, 8.5, 10.5, 20.9, 10.6 all have one thing in common. They are different ways of measuring the 2008 divorce rate in the US. Perhaps no single measure of family life is so often incorrectly reported and misunderstood.

Crude divorce rate from the National Center on Health Statistics. Beginning in 1867, the United States government began reporting the divorced rate based on the number of divorces per 1000 members of the US population. In 2008, this number which has become known as the crude divorce rate was 3.5. In the figure below you can see the crude US divorce rate over the past 140+ years.

via Robert Hughes: What is the real divorce rate in the US?.