Union dissolution and remarriage

This paper investigates determinants of marriage dissolution in India. District Level Household Survey-3 (2007-08) data have been used. This paper investigates the factors affecting the marriage dissolution in India by various geographical regions using multivariate hazard model. It is found that age at marriage is an important factor affecting the marriage dissolution after controlling for all other socioeconomic variables. Women marrying at their later ages, their risk of marriage dissolution are greater than those marrying at their early ages. Chances of getting divorce declines with the increasing level of education, it is found that at each unit increase of marital duration, women literate below high school the risk of failure increases 1.2 times as compare to others. Childless women are at greater risk for marriage dissolution. Results suggest that dissolution rates are quite higher in northeastern, western and southern regions.
Attempts have been also made to see the association between age at marriage and dissolution rates in various states of India by using census data (Census of India, 1971-2001). It is found in southern and northeastern region age at marriage and dissolution rate are high as compared to the northern, central, eastern and western region.

As growing numbers of children are born to cohabiting couples, increasing attention is paid to the higher instability of these families when compared to married ones. Even if theoretical thinking about the diffusion process of cohabitation is contemporaneous to studies on couple instability, researchers have seldom tested associations between them. We argue that the instability gap between cohabiting and married families is not constant over time and place; rather, it evolves in relation to the social status cohabitation has achieved in a given society. We explore a normativity hypothesis stating that as births within cohabitation become more common and thus more socially normative, cohabiting family instability decreases. We use multilevel logistic models with a series of cross-sectional Canadian data to compare the evolution of the odds of parental disruption for children in various geolinguistic groups, taken as proxies for normative environments. We find strong support for the normativity hypothesis in the Canadian context.

The relationship between education and divorce has recently reversed in several countries with the less educated men and women being currently more likely to divorce. This carries potential implications for class and gender inequalities in family life, well-being, and children’s life chances. However, little is known about why the least educated currently have lower family stability. Two main explanations can be identified in the literature. First, those with less education could have lower marital satisfaction. Second, those with less education could have lower thresholds to divorce. Relationship dissolution means that a person also gives up access to their partners’ resources. If spouses possess many resources, the drop in marital satisfaction required to motivate a person to divorce might therefore be higher.
Empirical evidence so far has not provided evidence which of the two explanations holds. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey to analyze the trends in marital satisfaction among educational groups and the risks of divorce in these groups given satisfaction levels. We find that marital satisfaction trajectories are practically identical for people with distinct levels of education. Additional analysis will be presented to investigate what explains variation in exit thresholds by education.

Using data from the longitudinal survey “Family and Social Subjects” carried out by ISTAT in two waves ( 2003 and 2007), this paper investigates the consequences of marital dissolution on individual subjective wellbeing in Italy. A key problem is disentangling causal effects, a challenge when the interplay between life course pathways and states of mind is investigated. Here we use propensity score matching estimates applied to panel data to estimates the impact of divorce or separation on a set of dimensions of subjective wellbeing. After a comparison among individuals with very similar profiles in terms of economic and social characteristics, results show as marital breakdown in Italy has a strong impact not only in reducing material well-being, but also on several dimensions of perceived subjective wellbeing, introducing uncertainty in the future (a form of psychological distress) with respect to housing, income and familiar conditions.

A recent boom in cohabitation in Mexico has sparked a debate about whether it is a new form or a renascence of the old. To be clear, the characterization of the old form of cohabitation focuses mostly about who cohabits and who does not (i.e., the low educated, etc.), but says little about its duration or dissolution via marriage and separation. Regrettably, claims of a new form of cohabitation are meted out without a thorough examination of cohabitation as a process. Therefore, I propose to establish a more accurate baseline using a multi-state transition formulation. Using data from two nationally representative surveys, this paper investigates the dynamism surrounding cohabitation as a status in matrix of possibilities, which is yet to be well understood. The current project contributes towards better understanding of the changing demographics of cohabitation in Mexico, and the nature and meaning of cohabitation around the world.

Indian marriage system has traditionally been characterized by universal marriage with strong caste endogamy, relatively early marriage and by very low divorce rates. But with economic liberalization, growth of mass media and increasing participation of women in tertiary education and in the paid labor force, the traditional marriage system has come under pressure. If media reports are believed, self-arranged marriages are becoming common and divorce rates are on the upward march. But these reports are based on anecdotal and selective data. The absence of good quality data on marriage has meant that there has not been any rigorous demographic study of these trends in India. However three recent surveys-- Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS, 2005-6), District Level Health Survey (DLHS-3, 2007-8) and Youth in India (2006-7)—have information on various aspects of marriage. Using these datasets, I will in this paper: present a comprehensive picture of marriage trends and characteristics covering topics such as the prevalence of arranged marriages, trends in consanguineous and endogamous marriages and assortative mating patterns and trends in divorce; Analyze variations by region, religion and education; c) situate the findings within the broader literature on changes in institutional, structural and ideational changes in India.

This study plans to make use of vital statistics data, 3 rounds of census data, and a large nationwide survey across 9 years to explore the expanding negative educational gradient in divorce risk in Taiwan. The findings show that the drastic increase in period divorce rates mask the fact that social inequality is expanding across educational lines—the least educated are becoming more vulnerable to union instability. The decade before and after the millennium emerge as two critical periods, as educational gap in divorce risks for those with and without college education go from nearly non-existent to a two-fold difference. The cohort analyses indicate that men and women born in the 1950s experienced the highest divorce rates than other groups. The good news is that the younger cohorts seem to have lower divorce rates than these “forerunners,” although the negative educational gradient is expanding for the younger generations.

The aim of this study is to investigate separations in Sweden and to see what factors that affect the dissolution of a union. The data used is based on information from the Swedish Total Population Register and covers the about 30 000 couples that had their first biological child in 2000. The couples are followed from the day that they started living together to a possible separation or the end of 2010.The result shows that when comparing with the child’s year of birth, the likelihood of separation is significant higher during all studied calendar years. The data is also analyzed using two Cox proportional hazard regression models. The first model, standardized by demographic factors, indicates for instance that young mothers and a short time of cohabitation means a high risk to separate and that cohabiting couples have a higher propensity to separate than married couples. The second model shows that low educated couples and couples were both are unemployed have a high risk to separate, when controlling for other socioeconomic factors. These results are consistent with earlier studies from the mid 1990s among parents based on Swedish register data.

This paper analyses socioeconomic differentials in children's likelihood of having shared residence, meaning living equal or near equal time with both parents after parental union dissolution. This is an aspect of modern family complexity that has so far largely been overlooked. The cross-sectional analysis is based on the Swedish Level of Living Study and Surveys of Living Conditions from 2000-2003. The tentative results show an increased likelihood of shared residence for children of women in non-manual occupations compared to children of manual working women after controlling for income and education. There were no occupational differences in the likelihood of shared residence for children living with a male respondent. The results show no educational differences after controlling for occupational category and other characteristics. We see a geographical pattern with shared residence being more common in the Stockholm metropolitan area compared to other major cities and rest of the country.

Partnership stability has decreased substantially in Europe, even among families with children. In parallel, new family forms in which not necessarily both parties of a couple are the biological parents of all the children, have become more common. In this paper, we seek to shed more light on the impact of family composition on the dissolution risk among families with children. We focus on Sweden given its strong emphasis on gender equality and generous family support system. We analyze data from the Young Adult Panel Study, conducted in 1999, 2003 and 2009. Hazard regression (exponential model) is our tool of analysis. Our preliminary results reveal that stepfamilies have an elevated breakup risk, but also blended families are more likely to dissolve than intact families. Stepmother families and where both partners have children from previous partnerships but no joint children have the highest breakup risk. Stepfather families that also include joint children have as low dissolution risk as intact families. Hence, our preliminary results suggest that family compositions have a differential impact on family disruption, and it is important to distinguish by the gender of the stepparent as well as between step- and blended families.