Disasters have a way to bring people together, but they also drive a wedge between them, a Penn State researcher found.

Catherine Cohan, assistant professor of human development, and Steve Cole, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied marriage, birth and divorce records in South Carolina from 1975 to 1997, focusing on the year directly after Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

In 1990, the counties hit by Hugo had increases in all three categories of study in comparison to the areas not affected by the hurricane.

Translating the information into meaningful statistic data was difficult, Cole said.

"Normally, if you use conventional statistics to analyze, you'll get the wrong (answer)," he said.

To counteract this problem, the researchers used a time-series analysis, which tells how much variable change there is and is the variation bigger than by chance alone.

"We know that the amount of marriages is going to bounce around from year to year," Cole said.

These numbers will fall within a certain range, but the data from Hugo exceeded that range.

"The effects we're seeing (are) not only specific in time, but they're specific in geography," Cole said.

Cole said scientists are always concerned that another factor caused the changes they are observing, but due to the specificity of the data, many other explanations can be ruled out.

The subject of a large trauma and its effect on people has a personal appeal to Cohan.

As a doctoral student at UCLA, he counseled a couple after the Northridge Earthquake in California.

"Before the earthquake, they didn't have any marital problems," she said.

While studying the statistics from Hugo, the researchers looked at two competing hypotheses.

Cole and Cohan derived their first idea from stress research, which focuses on mental health problems as a result from trauma.

"We know anxiety and pressure are related to marital conflict," Cohan said.

From this notion, the scientists expected to see an increase in divorces and decreases in marriages and births.

The second hypothesis came from attachment theory, which said a stressful event would cause people to come together for support and comfort.

Based on those concepts, Cohan and Cole thought marriages and births would increase, while marriages would decrease.

Cohan said seeing an increase in all three areas was unexpected.

For increased births, she said people's focuses might have been altered.

"People may put a greater priority on friends and family and having a baby may be a manifestation of (that)," Cohan said.

That raised awareness to friends and family could correlate to the increase in marriages, she said.

In regard to increase divorces, Cohan said, "The hurricane makes them take stock of their lives. Life is too short to remain in an unhappy relationship."

But, without conducting personal interviews, the reasons for the increases remain with the individual, and scientists can only speculate.

These traumatic events, such as losing a job or a home, can have prolonged effects on individuals.

"Those stressers take awhile to play out," Cohan said.

Some people might be more irritable or isolated as much as six months later because of the stresser, but they cannot make that attribution, Cohan said.

To cope with these stresses, it could be helpful for couples to attend counseling, Cohan said.

She added that low-cost counseling is often difficult to find, but said any kind of support would help.

This could come from anyone, such as a support group or a religious leader, Cohan said. She added there are some good books on marriage that could be useful.

The Sept. 11 attacks in New York might produce the same results, but Cohan said, "It's too early to have data come out of New York."