Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years
Abstract
Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilise a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.
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The Legacy of Parental Divorce: Social, economic and demographic experiences in adulthood
Abstract
This study addresses three questions. Firstly, to what extent does divorce during childhood have long-term consequences for the educational attainment, economic situation, partnership formation and dissolution, and parenthood behaviour in adulthood? We show that in most of these domains children who experience parental divorce in childhood have more negative experiences than children reared by both their parents. However, in answering our second question, as to whether child and family characteristics preceding divorce attenuates the relationship between the divorce itself and adult outcomes, we show that for the non-demographic ones there is evidence of powerful selection effects operating, particularly to do with financial hardship. In other words, children who grow up with both biological parents may end up better off educationally and economically largely because they were advantaged to begin with, not necessarily because their parents stayed together. The third question was - if parents remain together until their children are grown up before separating does this lessen the legacy of divorce on their adult children’s lives? The answer is in the affirmative for most of the adult outcomes, but the instability of partnerships and marriages was as high amongst those whose parents separated after they had grown up as those who experienced parental divorce during childhood.
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