Abstract
In this paper, we investigate how associations between personality traits and divorce have changed over time. Competing hypotheses are derived based on social exchange theory, crisis theory, and changing selection into marriage. A combination of retrospective and prospective data on marriages contracted between 1972 and 2009 is used from the British Household Survey ( n = 4169), the Divorce in Flanders study ( n = 4377), and the German Socio-Economic Panel ( n = 8155). Discrete-time event history models are estimated to look at changes over time in the associations between the ‘Big Five’ personality traits and divorce. The results show generally similar associations between divorce and personality traits across Britain, Flanders and Germany, and display relatively little change over time. Divorce seems, in general, to have become characterized less by people who behave in unconventional ways (high openness to experience) and, to some extent, more by people that do not keep up social relations as much as others (low conscientiousness). These results are congruent with predictions derived from a social exchange perspective, where traits related to external barriers to divorce are expected to become less important as divorce becomes more common and less costly in social, legal and economic terms.
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