Trends in Marital Dissolution by Women's Education in the United States

By Steven P. Martin. 2006

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 16,452) to measure trends in marital dissolution rates for U.S. women by education level. In marriage cohorts from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, marital dissolution rates fell among women with a 4-year college degree or more, but remained high among women with less than a 4-year college degree. This diverging trend began in the mid-1970s and is not explained by recent increases in women's overall educational attainment, nor by recent increases in age at marriage timing and premarital childbearing. These results suggest a growing association between socioeconomic disadvantage and family instability.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e96a5f8c3f5fd49bb34f579e3e4cdf881f316868

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Citations in the corpus

De-standardization and gender convergence in work–family life courses in Great Britain: A multi-channel sequence analysis (2015, methodology): “These educational patterns in timing of parenthood and ties to paid work have been observed using techniques other than sequence analysis (Berrington, 2001; Fry & Cohn, 2010; Martin, 2006).”
Socioeconomic Status, Family Processes, and Individual Development (2010, background): “For example, research reports during the past 10 years have shown that higher levels of educational attainment are associated with greater marital stability (e.g., Heaton, 2002; Martin, 2006; Orbuch, Veroff, Hassan, & Horrocks, 2002).”
Demographic Trends in the United States: A Review of Research in the 2000s (2010, methodology): “Figure 1, from Martin (2006), illustrates this trend over the 20-year period, 1975 to 1994, using retrospective reports by women in the 1996 and 2001 Surveys of Income and Program Participation.”
Economic Insecurity and Social Stratification (2012, background): “Martin (2006) reports life table estimates of divorce rates for first marriages from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.”
Women's Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility (2010, background): “Remarried Full sample White Women Black Women White Men Black Men”
How Education Enhances Happiness: Comparison of Mediating Factors in Four East Asian Countries (2012, background): “is a trend of increasing educational differentials in marital dissolution (Hoem 1997; Martin 2006; Raymo et al. 2004).”
The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen (2014, background): “%) for marriages that began in the early 1990s (Martin, 2006).”