Marital separation and divorce
Is marriage: 1. a voluntary contract that can be
ended by either partner; 2. a lifetime
commitment “til death do us part?”
(How did the women in Promises I Can Keep
see it?)
Gallup poll: “Do you believe that an unhappy
marriage should be maintained for the sake of
the children?”
Sociology 1201
Divorce: Trends and Comparisons
U.S. Rates (why measure divorce this
way?)
 1960: 9 per 1000 married women
 1970: 15
 1980: 23
 1990: 21
 2000: 19
 2005: 16
 2009: 16
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Sociology 1201
Why the rapid increase?
Legal changes: “no fault marriage”
 Changing expectations: “best friend”
 Cultural emphasis: self-fulfillment
Women’s employment trends
 Men’s employment trends
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Why the rapid increase? Why the leveling
off?
Sociology 1201
Correlates of Divorce
Family income
 Education
 Age at first marriage!
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Who initiates divorce? 2/3-3/4 initiated by
the wife? Ideas about why?
Sociology 1201
Last year’s 1201 class:
divorce/split
No divorce/split/death
65(69%)
Divorce/split when you were under 6
11(12%)
Divorce/split when you were 6-12
9(10%)
Divorce/split during teen years
6 (6%)
Died during your childhood or teen yrs
3(3%)
Sociology 1201
Last year’s class: remarry?
Parents
remarry?
Who had
custody?
Maintained close
connection
with?
Mother
7
15
12
Father
9
0
0
Both
8
11
17
Sociology 1201
Should the laws be changed
to make divorce more difficult?
The General Social Survey
Divkids, divnow, divifkid,
divlaw
Sociology 1201
How serious are the issues that
usually precipitate a divorce?
Arlene Skolnick: “Grounds for Marriage”, from
Family in Transition, 2005. Longitudinal study of
couples over a 24 year period.
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Each spouse was interviewed in 1958(age 30 or 37)
and again in 1970 and 1982
…“most striking impression from following these
marriages through long periods of time is the great
potential for change in human relationships.”
Almost 1/3 divorced but “many unhappy couples
remained married long enough to outgrow their earlier
difficulties.”
Sociology 1201
Robert Weis: Marital Separation,
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Research basis: Seminar for the separated at
Harvard
Common Themes: wrong from the start, wanting
different things, serious failings in spouse
(including mental illness), sexual infidelity
Impact on self (symbolic interaction)
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Betrayal and duplicity
Direct attacks on self
Obsessive review
“Accounts” … we tell our own story, to ourselves and
often to family and friends (symbolic interactionism)
Sociology 1201
Diane Vaughn, Uncoupling
Research basis: Interviews with 103
divorced or separated men or women
 Her own divorce: “Rather than an abrupt
ending, ours appeared in retrospect to
have been a gradual transition. Long
before we physically separated, we had
been separating socially—developing
separate friends, experiences, and
futures”

Sociology 1201
Vaughn: common patterns
1. Harboring secret unhappiness
 2. Making the initial disclosure
 3. Pursuing outside involvements
 4. Accentuating the negative
 5. Deciding to separate
 6. Going public
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Sociology 1201
Wallerstein and Blakeslee: Second
Chances

Began in 1971, with 60 families, including
131 children, aged 2-18
Recruited by advertisements in
newspapers…counseling as benefit of
participating in a long-term study
 More educated, more affluent, more white
than population as a whole
 In early stages of divorce
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Sociology 1201
Second Chances for Adults
Few adults anticipate accurately how
arduous and depleting divorce will be
 At five year point, half of men and 2/3 of
women content with quality of their lives;
but half of men and 1/3 of women felt
stalled or even more unhappy than during
failed marriage
 At ten-year point, half of women and 1/3 of
men still intensely angry with ex-spouse
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Sociology 1201
Parents and kids
Unlike most crises, many of these parents
were unable to protect their kids first in this
crisis.
 By ten-year point, 60% of the children over
18 seemed to be on a downward trajectory
(in terms of education and social class)
compared with their fathers and as they
reached college age, few received any
assistance from their noncustodial fathers
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Sociology 1201
Major critics of Wallerstein

Cherlin and Fursternburg, Divided
Families
Lack of representative sampling
 Lack of a control group of kids not
experiencing divorce
 Basis for their book, Divided Familes, based
on National Survey of Children, in which
representative sample of parents and children
are interviewed at five year intervals
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Sociology 1201
Fading Fathers
Five years after divorce: nearly half of kids
do not have contact with their fathers even
once a year
 Why? Child support issues (depending on
social class), parenting skills of fathers,
very part-time parenting
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Sociology 1201
How did they measure child
well-being?
NSC data: In the last four years, has your
child had any behavior problems at school
resulting in your being asked to come in?
 34% of children of divorce vs. 20% of
children whose parents had not divorced
 Children of divorce certainly doing no
worse than children in intact, high contact
homes
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Sociology 1201
Kurz, For Richer, for Poorer
Research basis: interviews with a random
sample of 129 mothers who obtained
divorces through the Philadelphia family
court.
 Only 19% cited personal satisfaction as
the reason for the divorce; 81% cited
domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse,
sexual infidelity, or other serious reasons
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Sociology 1201
Bad to Cherlin and Furstenburg
Female-headed families six times more
likely to be poor.
 Child support system improving but still
not generous, at least compared with the
British system (where Cherlin got funded
for a large-scale study of divorce)
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Sociology 1201
Public Policy Recommendations
Reduce conflict between parents:
Implement primary caretaker standard for
custody
 Award joint custody cautiously, as it is
dependent on a level of cooperation that
many divorcing parents have not shown
 Help custodial parent function better by
improving child support and collections
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Sociology 1201
The Case for Divorce: V. Rutter
Are there some cases where divorce is
better for the kids?
 R: “If my now-divorced parents had been
happily married, life would have been
different and a divorce would have been a
big loss.... But that wasn’t the case. They
treated each other with contempt…” We
need to ask: compared to what?
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Sociology 1201
Divorce for the kids?
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“Research shows the consequences of
staying in a distressed marriage for kids as
well as adults are myriad in long-lived. In
those cases, perhaps the line shouldn’t be
“stay together for the kids” but “get
divorced for the kids,” not to mention the
health and well-being of the parents, on
whom the children depend.:”
Sociology 1201
Resilient children of divorce
1989: Psychologist Mavis Hetherington
made a case that most children of divorce
fare just as well as children from intact
families.
 1989: Judith Wallerstein refuted those
findings but also had a different research
methodology… See p. 162-163
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Sociology 1201
What was the worst kind of
family for children?
Hetherington’s study: “The worst kind of
family for a child to be raised in, in terms
of mental health and behavior, was a
distressed, married family.”
 Andrew Cherlin: longitudinal studies in
England and the United States confirmed
Hethington’s findings
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Sociology 1201
Cherlin confirms Hetherington

About 10% of children overall are at risk
for mental health problems; about 20-25%
of children of divorce are similarly at risk.
But the difference existed before the
divorce. “Parents who end up divorcing
are different than parents who don’t end
up divorcing. They relate to each other
differently; they relate to their children
differently.”
Sociology 1201
1998: update from Cherlin
Respondents from the 1991 study had
gotten 7 years older. Postdisruption effects
had accumulated. The worst were financial
hardship and loss of paternal involvement.
 But the worst off were still the children in
the distressed marriages. Amato and
Sobolewski replicated these results, based
on 17 year study of married and divorced
families.
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Sociology 1201
Does divorce make you happy?
Title of an article by Linda Waite, which
answers in the negative… Waite vs.
Rutter, p. 164
 Finish “The Case for Divorce” and the
shorter articles assigned for today
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Sociology 1201
Sociology 1201
Sociology 1201