Divorce In The United States Research Articles

Gender and the Economic Consequences of Divorce in the United States: Variation by Race and Ethnicity

Gender and the Economic Consequences of Divorce in the United States: Variation by Race and Ethnicity

A Systematic Review Identifying Child-Focused Assessment Tools to Improve the Development and Evaluation of Divorce Education Programs

ABSTRACT Divorce education programs have increased in prevalence over time due to the high and sustained rate of divorce in the United States. These programs have been shown to improve familial relationship quality post-divorce, especially for children, with many states requiring parents to complete a divorce education program prior to the issuance of the final judgment. However, divorce education programs vary greatly in length, content, and goals due to the lack of standardization. Using the Divorce-Stress-Adjustment Theory, this systematic review focuses on identifying assessment tools that can be utilized to operationalize common content areas identified by Schramm and colleagues in 2018 that are delivered within many divorce education programs. In total, 18 measures were identified that could be used to operationalize a set of eight constructs and sub-constructs. Recommendations are provided for assessment tools that could effectively be used for program evaluation and suggestions are made for future research.

Increases in shared custody after divorce in the United States

Increases in shared custody after divorce in the United States

Marriage Dissolution in the United States: A Survival Analysis Approach

ABSTRACT To estimate the survival time of marriages, we investigate influential factors, such as geographical area, educational level, income, children, ethnicity, and economic class, affecting marriages in the United States. Despite evidence that divorce has increased in the Unties States, research has not widely applied survival analysis which can evaluate several factors related to the divorce rate and marriage survival. Drawing from diverse areas of scholarship, we point out that divorce is circumstantial based on multiple social, cultural, and economic variables. Different survival analysis techniques were applied to predict divorce in the United States using a dataset, focusing on four different states, over a time period of 35 years. We discover that numerous social and economic factors drastically influence the survival time of a marriage. With respect to survival, having children decreases marriage survival and a high level of education or a high income increases marriage survival. Experimental results how that 51.4\\% of the studied samples would experience divorce after 35 years of marriage. Applications of a survival analysis model has great potential in social science settings. Our findings suggest that wealth and education are key to understanding the greater longevity of marriage. A clear understanding of covariates and patterns, can in turn, help agencies to identify issues, predict future behavior, and enable them to provide proactive support for affected families.

Pandemic Shortfall in Marriages and Divorces in the United States.

Prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, marriage and divorce had been in decline across the United States. As more data are released, evidence mounts that this pattern has persisted, and in some states been magnified, during the pandemic. The authors compared the change in yearly marriage and divorce counts prior to the beginning of the pandemic (change from 2018 to 2019) to estimate an expected number of marriages and divorces for 2020. By computing a P score on the basis of expected and observed marriages and divorces in 2020, the authors determined whether individual states experienced shortfalls or surpluses of marital events. Of the 20 states with available data on marriages, 18 experienced shortfalls (exceptions included Missouri and North Dakota), for an overall sample shortfall of nearly 11 percent. Regarding divorces, 31 of the 35 states with available data also experienced shortfalls (exceptions included Hawaii, Wyoming, Arizona, and Washington), for an overall sample shortfall of 12 percent.

Gray divorce: Explaining midlife marital splits

ABSTRACTRecent research suggests that one out of every four divorces in the United States is now “gray,” meaning that at least one half of the couple has reached the age of 50 when the marriage breaks down. To understand why this age group—the Baby Boomer generation—is splitting up, this study conducted 40 in-depth, semistructured interviews with men and 40 with women who have experienced a gray divorce in their lifetimes. Respondents’ beliefs in an expressive individualistic model of marriage, where partnerships are only valuable if they help individuals achieve personal growth, were compared against their potential adherence to what I call a commitment-based model of marriage, where binding, romantic love holds couples together unless there is severe relationship strain. The results demonstrated that the commitment-based model most strongly governs marriage and the decision to divorce among Baby Boomers for both sexes, although some specific reasons for divorce differ for men and women.

Recruiting Hard-to-Reach Populations: The Utility of Facebook for Recruiting Qualitative In-Depth Interviewees

We present a cost efficient methodology for using social media to recruit a low incidence, hard-to-reach population. For qualitative research investigating the policy implications of divorce later in life, we were challenged to recruit a pool of qualified respondents to secure 80 in-depth interview subjects of geographic diversity divided evenly by sex. Although “gray divorce” (i.e., divorce at or over 50 years old) is increasingly common – approximately one in four of all divorces in the United States now occurs within this age group – the incidence rate of individuals in the general population meeting these criteria renders traditional recruitment methods cost-prohibitive. With limited resources and the need for microtargeting, we turned to Facebook: Over four waves totaling 13 days, we recruited 178 qualified respondents from which we successfully selected 40 male and 40 female interviewees while preserving geographic diversity. We specified the characteristics of Facebook users who would be exposed to our solicitation; overall, we generated the respondent pool at a mean cost of $1.18 per respondent, for a total recruitment cost of $210.04. Compared to other recruitment approaches, the speed and cost-efficiency of this methodology was overwhelmingly superior.

Recession and Divorce in the United States, 2008-2011.

Recession may increase divorce through a stress mechanism, or reduce divorce by exacerbating cost barriers or strengthening family bonds. After establishing an individual-level model predicting U.S. women's divorce, the paper tests period effects, and whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce using the 2008-2011 American Community Survey. Results show a downward spike in the divorce rate after 2008, almost recovering to the expected level by 2011, which suggests a negative recession effect. On the other hand, state foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce with individual controls, although this effect is not significant when state fixed effects are introduced. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. Future research will have to determine why national divorce odds fell during the recession while state-level economic indicators were not strongly associated with divorce. Exploratory analysis which shows unemployment decreasing divorce odds for those with college degrees, while foreclosures have the opposite effect, provides one possible avenue for such research.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010

This article critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data have led some analysts to conclude that divorce has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the age composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over age 35. Among the youngest couples, however, divorce rates are stable or declining. If current trends continue, overall age-standardized divorce rates could level off or even decline over the next few decades. We argue that the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage.

Analyzing divorce from cultural and network approaches

Because of the high divorce rate and subsequent outpouring of research on divorce in the United States and other Westernized countries, divorce is often framed from an individualistic perspective as a process that is negotiated between two individuals – as ‘his and her divorce. ’A primary assumption is that the spouses negotiate what is best for them and their children, seemingly irrespective of extended kin or culture. This study provides a more complex understanding of the role of culture in the divorce process by examining divorce from culture and network theory approaches. Interviews with 60 Mexican Americans who experienced divorce are combined with the extant literature to illustrate how culture and social networks shape divorce decisions and behaviors. Five themes surfaced from the interviews: (1) power differentials and gender roles, (2) female collective empowerment, (3) social capital, network density, and family members as stakeholders, (4) family members as bridges of structural holes and (5) religion as culture and law.

Pornography and Divorce

We test whether pornography causes divorce. Using state-level panel data on the divorce rate and sales of Playboy magazine, we document a strong cross-sectional and time-series relation between lagged sales of Playboy and the divorce rate. The simple correlation between divorce and sales lagged two years is 44 percent, with a T-statistic of 20. This large correlation is robust to using only the first half of the sample, adjusting for all state-level heterogeneity and for any time trends by including state and year fixed effects, and using an instrumental variable to correct for any possible endogeneity in Playboy sales. Divorce rates are also significantly correlated with sales of Penthouse but they are not correlated with sales of Time magazine. Our overall estimates suggest that pornography probably caused 10 percent of all divorces in the United States in the sixties and seventies.

Booms, Busts, and Divorce.

For almost a century, anecdotes have suggested that divorce rates decline during recessions. However, until very recently there has been surprisingly little formal empirical evidence on whether such a link exists, let alone its magnitude if it does. Moreover, the anticipated direction of the effect is ambiguous theoretically. Although previous studies have concluded that individual job loss destabilizes marriages, macroeconomic conditions may affect divorce probabilities even for those not directly experiencing a job shock. We add to the few existing contemporaneous studies of the effects of macroeconomic shocks on divorce by conducting an empirical analysis of the relationship between state-level unemployment rates and state-level divorce rates using vital statistics data on divorces in the United States from 1976-2009. We find a significant and robust negative relationship between the unemployment and divorce rates, whereby a one percentage point rise in the unemployment rate is associated with a decrease of 0.043 divorces per one thousand people, or about a one percent fall in the divorce rate. The result that divorce is pro-cyclical is robust to a host of alternative empirical specifications, to disaggregating by state characteristics and time period, to expanding the unemployment series back to 1970, and to using alternative measures of local economic conditions.

To Be or Not to Be (a Parent)? – Not Precisely the Question; The Frozen Embryo Dispute

Modern medicine offers us a variety of fertility treatments. One of the results is that in the United States alone there are a more than 400,000 frozen embryos and another 10,000 frozen embryos are frozen each year. Since the rate of divorce in the United States increases exponentially, one can easily imagine how many frozen embryos may become the subject of litigation. Indeed a lot of attention is devoted to this sort of dispute by the media, the law and by people considering the ethical aspects. This is because this kind of dispute forces us to reassess many complex matters starting with the appropriate balance between the legal right to become a parent and the legal right not to be forced to become a parent. In this research we will try to present for reassessment the legal dispute as dichotomy and binary as if we have to choose between two options, either full legal parentage or no legal parentage. We will prove that the establishment of legal parentage is primarily by agreement due to the intention, wish and agreement which led to the birth of a child. In our opinion, the extent of parental status to be given to the legal parent depends upon the extent of the responsibility, which he is willing to undertake. If he accepts all the parental duties, his status will be that of a full parenthood, but if he does not want to undertake all the parental duties, he will not receive any parental right, but simply the status of non-parenthood. This approach used in the case of adoption was also applied in legal practice in many states of the United States and in the world, whereby the donor of gamete, semen and ova, or even frozen embryo receives the status of non-parenthood. In this research we will endeavor to examine the value and efficiency of offering an additional legal option which may be a possible compromise in the case of the bitter quarrels with regard to frozen embryos - granting the non-parenthood status to the spouse who objects to the continued fertility treatments and to becoming a parent against his will.

The Correlation of the Suicide Rates With the Rates of Unemployment and Divorce in the United States During Seventeen Years

The Correlation of the Suicide Rates With the Rates of Unemployment and Divorce in the United States During Seventeen Years

Husbands' and Wives' Education and Divorce in the United States and Japan, 1946-2000

How the relationship between status and divorce shifts over historical time among industrialized countries remains largely unknown. A socioeconomic growth hypothesis posits that a more recent marriage cohort (relative to a previous cohort) in an industrialized country exhibits (1) larger divorce-suppressive effects of husbands' and wives' higher level of education and (2) a shift from a pattern in which only husbands' education substantially influences the couples' likelihood of divorce to a pattern in which both spouses' education influences that likelihood. The author tests the need to modify this hypothesis to reflect the intervening influences of cultural-institutional arrangements using the United States and Japan. The author applies event history regressions to the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Japanese General Social Survey. Results from both countries suggest the needs for modifications and imply that divorce is increasingly tied to socioeconomic inequality in both industrialized countries, but in contrasting ways.

Divorce Laws and the Structure of the American Family

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of no‐fault divorce laws on marriage and divorce in the United States. I propose a theory that captures the key stylized facts of the rising then declining divorce rates and the apparent convergence of divorce rates across the different divorce regimes. The empirical results suggest that a shift from fault to no‐fault divorce increased the odds of divorcing for those couples who married before the shift. The analysis further suggests that those couples who marry after the shift to a no‐fault regime, in turn, sort themselves better upon marriage, which offsets the direct effect of the law on divorce rates. Consistent with that selectivity argument, after a switch to a no‐fault divorce regime, women get married later in life. These results hold for the law that governs property division and spousal support. The law that governs divorce grounds does not seem to matter significantly.

Three Constructive Interventions for Divorced, Divorcing, or Never-Married Parents

Divorce in the United States affects millions of children and families. Many of these children and families seek individual/family counseling or educational services offered by counselors and, therefore, counselors need to be well-equipped to work with nontraditional families. The purpose of this article is to share three counseling techniques for use with parents undergoing separation and/or divorce. These techniques are primarily constructive and educational. They include a reframing technique for mandated clients, a reframing technique to help parents recognize the difference between their coparenting wishes and goals, and an educational problem-solving strategy for parents who struggle with their children’s postseparation/divorce behaviors. Anecdotes and case examples are used to articulate how these techniques can be used in clinical practice.

Cultivating Resilience in Children From Divorced Families

The statistics for divorce in the United States are alarming. Among the shouting there are voices that are not being heard: the children’s. Empirical research has shown that the implementation of protective measures may increase the probability of a child becoming resilient in the face of divorce. This review of current literature is written to discuss what resiliency is and what protective factors will benefit the child. Counseling implications will be presented also.

“Economic Theory’s Stance On No-Fault Divorce”

This article explores key insights that economic theory can shed on the issue of no-fault divorce in the United States, addressing modifications in the incentive structure of individuals that resulted from the legislative reforms of the 1970s. After stressing the importance of correctly interpreting and classifying divorce laws, this work investigates the contributions of the theory of property rights, the contributions of game theory and intra-household bargaining, and the contributions of general equilibrium analysis in our understanding of how divorce laws work and what their impact is. By doing so, this expose analyzes the theoretical consequences of no-fault divorce on the decision whether to get married or divorced, on the characteristics of spouses and divorcees, on divorce rates, and on marital-specific and non marital-specific investments.

The Impact of Religious Homogeneity on the Rate of Divorce in the United States

This study extends the understanding of the relationship between religious homogeneity, that is, the extent to which formal religious groups are concentrated at the county level, and the rate of persons currently divorced in those counties. Linking the research question to Durkheimian precepts of religion as an integrative force in social life, the essential question is, “At the county level, does the rate of currently divorced vary inversely with more concentrated affiliation with formal religious organizations?” We investigate this relationship using data from the 1990 U.S. Census and from the Glenmary Research Center that encompasses 621 counties in the U.S., that is, a 20 percent random sample of counties from each state. As hypothesized, the divorced rate is inversely related to religious homogeneity, even after controlling for a series of factors that have been shown to be correlated with divorce in other studies.