English 
Français
Español

Gains to marriage, relative resources, and divorce initiation

Liana C. Sayer, Ohio State University
Paula S. England, Stanford University
Paul Allison, University of Pennsylvania

In most divorces, one person initiates the breakup when the other still prefers that the couple remain together. The innovation of our study is classifying divorces according to whether the wife or husband initiates it and determining whether a spouse who negatively assesses the marriage is more likely to initiate the divorce. We also examine whether the associations between marital utility and dissolution differ by which spouses’ report of initiation is used. Using a competing hazards framework, we find that spouse A’s dim view of the utility of the marriage predicts whether A (but not B) initiates divorce. Our findings suggest that the story of how subjective assessments of marital satisfaction predict who leaves whom is similar, regardless of whether we use the wife’s report or the husband’s report.

  See paper

Presented in Session 100: Methodologies for data collection and analysis of gender relations