Union dissolution and remarriage

Sequence analysis, which allows studying life courses as meaningful units, has been increasingly used in both sociology and demography in recent years. Nonetheless, it has been exploited mainly as a descriptive tool for employment histories and, to a smaller extent, childberaring and residential mobility. In these applications, the challenge to compare and classify sequences for explanatory purposes has largely been bypassed by imposing a static perspective on sequence data and by focusing on how a set of individuals is distributed among states. This choice, in part, is due to the fact that in the social sciences there is little agreement about how we can compare sequences and “cluster” them through the tools of optimal matching (OM). In this paper, we expand the approach of Billari and Piccarreta (2005) to recurrent events for studying marital trajectories in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The purpose of this research is to study the effect of different types of divorce on different post-divorce reconstruction types among Iranian divorced people. Based on this aim, we employed a qualitative approach to find the different types of divorce and post divorce experience and also semi-structured, one-on-one in-depth interviews were used to collect data from 36 divorced men and women.
The results show that divorced individuals experience different types of divorce and there are significant differences in post-divorce experiences between these different types of divorce. We explored three major types of divorce (rational divorce, forced divorce, hasty divorce) and three main types of post-divorce reconstruction (active reconstruction, double side reconstruction and passive reconstruction). The findings show that the people who experience forced divorce have the most difficult reconstruction process, and that most of them confront their post-divorce life passively, while the people who experience rational divorce spend their post-divorce reconstruction constructively and more easily than the others. The results show that we have different types of reactions and adjustments to divorce, and every category has its own characteristics.
Implications of the findings for program support and divorce interventions are discussed.

We use data from the Birth to Twenty Cohort study in Johannesburg, South Africa to 1) describe trajectories of father involvement over the early life course of children and 2) examine the association between trajectories and the union dynamics of parents. We use sequence analysis to describe patterns of paternal engagement using residential and non-residential contact and the receipt of financial support as measures of involvement. We use multinomial logit models to examine the influence of union dissolution of parents and subsequent union formation of mothers on patterns of father involvement. Preliminary results suggest that 40% of children experience uninterrupted contact with fathers; 14% begin life having contact but lose it permanently at some point and the rest experience interrupted periods of contact. We find that children who experience parental union dissolution later in life have higher odds of having continuous contact with and support from their fathers post dissolution.