The Divorce Decline and Relationship Stability: 1970-2019

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Title: The Divorce Decline and Relationship Stability: 1970-2019 ABSTRACT/PROJECT SUMMARY To assess fundamental questions such as “what is happening to the family?” in the United States, we need to understand basic trends in family patterns. An area in which there are gaps in our knowledge—but is of deep importance to individuals and the public—is trends in divorce and relationship stability. Issues of data quality, the rise of cohabitation and the increasing selectivity of marriage, changes in population composition, and diverging patterns by education and race/ethnicity complicate analyses of trends. The primary goal of this research is to determine the extent to which the observed decline of divorce in the U.S. since the late 1970s should be interpreted as evidence of increased coresidential relationship stability. To address this question, we combine two data sets that contain information on marriage and cohabitation entry and dissolution that together avoid many of the pitfalls of prior data sources; estimate the extent to which changes in selection into marriage and population composition explain trends; incorporate the often overlooked older- population who now constitute important contributors to dissolution rates; and examine differentials by education, race/ethnicity, and parenthood status. Given that even recent research on divorce and marital dissolution finds, on average, negative associations with adult and child well-being (e.g., Kim, 2011; Leopold, 2018), should the decline in divorce rates since the late 1970s be interpreted as a cause for optimism about the stability of committed romantic relationships in the U.S.? There are several reasons to doubt this interpretation. First, recent research has raised the possibility that the divorce decline is an artifact of data problems and changes in population composition (Kennedy & Ruggles, 2014) rather than a true increase in relationship stability. Second, the divorce rate does not capture other kinds of relationship dissolution such as marital separation and cohabitation breakup. Thus, an examination of divorce rates alone underestimates the dissolution of coresidential unions. Third, there are sizeable differences in marital dissolution by education, race/ethnicity, and parenthood status. Marital dissolution has only declined for women with a college degree and not for those with less education (Martin, 2006), and trends also differ by race/ethnicity (Raley et al., 2015). But combined union dissolution trends for coresidential unions by education, race/ethnicity, and parenthood status have not been estimated to our knowledge. Our research addresses each of these issues. The results will allow us to assess whether the decline in divorce observed in past studies can be interpreted as evidence of a decline in relationship instability, and if so, the extent to which this is shared across key population subgroups in the U.S.