Websites with names like ‘Elena’s Models’ and ‘Russian Brides Cyber Guide’ aren’t the sort of websites you’d expect to be involved in a study on marriage and divorce, but that’s just what they’ve done.

Both sites are known for their ‘Russian Brides’ and they’ve invited their members to participate in the survey, which is the largest of its kind in the last 18 years. The sites have over 200,000 members between them, and the survey they are participating in is about marriage and divorce between cross-cultural couples.

The survey is catered towards couples of mixed nationalities and features questions about the length of marriages and aims to discover the divorce rate surrounding them.

Some of the factors in the divorce rates, or success rates of the marriages include:

Age difference between the partners
Education and income levels
Presence of children from former marriages and children born in the new marriage
Age of the partners
Duration of the courtship
Participation of a marriage broker.

168,000 members from Elena’s Models and 37,000 members from Russian Brides Cyber Guide were invited to participate in the survey.

Previous research into the field of mail order marriages was conducted in 1990, and it showed that the divorce rate among these marriages was far lower than the divorce rate among regular marriages. Mail order marriages featured a 20% divorce rate, when compared with a 50% divorce rate at the time in conventional marriages.