One blurb on the back of "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" says that the book "reads like a compelling novel." Fair enough, but how does it rate as a bona fide "landmark study" of American divorce?

Ever since the publication of "Second Chances," Wallerstein's work has been criticized for relying on a fairly selective sample: 131 children from middle-class, overwhelmingly white California couples who were divorced in 1971. (From this original group, only 93 were reinterviewed at the 25-year mark.) In the earlier book, her conclusions about the problems that beset children of divorce were not matched against a control group of children from intact families. This time, there is a "comparison sample" of 44 young adults, recruited mainly through alumni networks at the high schools attended by subjects in the divorce study.

Findings from national studies, cited by Wallerstein in the appendix, cast further doubt on her methodology. Forty percent of adult children of divorce in her sample never married, compared with just 24 percent in the same age range in a series of national surveys. In both studies, around 40 percent of the marriages had ended in divorce.

	Tomorrow An interview with Dr. Judith Wallerstein Print story E-mail story

The national data, however, show only a moderately lower prevalence of divorce for people raised in intact families (35 percent) -- whereas in Wallerstein's "intact" comparison sample, only 9 percent of the marriages had broken up. And while Wallerstein found that men and women whose parents had divorced were much less likely to have children than were those from intact marriages, national data indicate no difference in childbearing rates between the two groups.

Fellow divorce researcher Sanford Braver, a psychologist at Arizona State University and author of "Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths" (1998), points out that Wallerstein also relies on clinical interviews rather than the standardized tests that are commonly used to measure mental well-being and social adjustment. One might say that such a critique tells us more about the biases of social science than about the weaknesses of Wallerstein's work, and that therapylike interviews can provide far better insights into what is really happening in people's lives. But such a method, Braver says, is "subjective and excessively vulnerable to the biases of the interviewer."

Even more disturbing, says Braver, is the fact that Wallerstein only rarely acknowledges that "there are literally hundreds of better designed studies that contradict some of her conclusions." In the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Joan Berlin Kelly of the University of California at San Francisco reviews research from the 1990s on the impact of divorce on children and concludes that although children of divorce do tend to fare worse emotionally, socially and academically than children from intact families, "the magnitude of the differences is quite small" and "the long-term outcome of divorce for the majority of children is resiliency rather than dysfunction."

In "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce," resiliency is sometimes celebrated but the theme of dysfunction prevails.

Kelly happens to be Wallerstein's former collaborator on the divorce study and the coauthor of her first book, "Surviving the Breakup" (1980); today, she has strong misgivings about the direction her ex-colleague's work has taken. She has yet to read the latest book but was "appalled" by the emphasis on the negative in "Second Chances." "Judy," she says, "is very enamored of pathology."

How much of that pathology can be attributed to the parents' divorce and how much to their bad marriage? No one knows for sure. Kelly's research indicates that many of the troubles afflicting children of divorce usually predate the parents' separation by years. In Wallerstein's own novellas, it's often hard to tell if the divorce is the real culprit. One woman complains she has no idea "how to settle an argument without panicking." But what "internal template" for conflict resolution did her family give her before the breakup? "My parents were always fighting," she tells Wallerstein. "Mom was a shrieker and Dad would just walk out."

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