Does religion make a difference? : assessing the effects of Christian affiliation and practice on marital solidarity and divorce in Britain, 1985-2005

Marital breakdown rates were examined among 15,714 adults from the British Social Attitudes dataset for 1985-2005. Separation and divorce peaked at around 50 years of age, and increased significantly over the period of study. Ratios of separation or divorce were compared between respondents who had no religious affiliation and (a) Christian affiliates who attended church at least once a month, (b) Christian affiliates who attended church, but less than once a month, and (c) Christian affiliates who never attended church. The results showed that active Christians were 1.5 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown than non-affiliates, but there was no difference between affiliates who never attended church and those of no religion. Christians who attended infrequently were 1.3 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown compared to non-affiliates, suggesting that even infrequent attendance at church may have some significance for predicting the persistence of martial solidarity

Effects of Divorce on Mental Health Through the Life Course

The long-term effects of divorce on individuals after the transition to adulthood are examined using information from a British birth cohort that has been followed from birth to age 33. Growth-curve models and fixed-effects models are estimated. The results suggest that part of the seeming effect of parental divorce on adults is a result of factors that were present before the parents’ marriages dissolved. But in addition, the results also suggest that there is an effect of the divorce and its aftermath on adult mental health. Moreover, a parental divorce during childhood or adolescence appears to continue to have a negative effect when a person is in his or her twenties and early thirties

Parental Divorce in Childhood and Demographic Outcomes in Young Adulthood

We investigated the long-term effects of parental divorce in childhood on demographic outcomes in young adulthood, using a British longitudinal national survey of children. Our analyses control for predisruption characteristics of the child and the family, including emotional problems, cognitive achievement, and socioeconomic status. The results show that by age 23, those whose parents divorced were more likely to leave home because of friction, to cohabit, and to have a child outside marriage than were those whose parents did not divorce. Young adults whose parents divorced, however, were no more or less likely to marry or to have a child in a marriage. Moreover, even in the divorced group, the great majority did not leave home because of friction or have a child outside marriage.NICH

The Ups and Downs in Women's Employment: Shifting Composition or Behavior from 1970 to 2010?

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing women’s employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married women’s employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

Determinants of Minority-White Differentials in Child Poverty

This paper uses data from the 1993-2001 March Current Population Survey to estimate the extent to which child living arrangements, parental work patterns, and immigration attributes shape racial and ethnic variation in child poverty. Results from multivariate analyses and a standardization technique reveal that parental work patterns as well as child living arrangements are especially consequential for black and Puerto-Rican economic circumstances. Child immigration generation and parental length of residence seem to play a detrimental role in shaping poverty among Asian, Mexican, and Central/South American children. We also found that the extent to which differences in the composition of and returns to parental resources determine white-minority economic gaps varies substantially across racial and ethnic lines. The social and economic implications of the findings for understanding racial and ethnic inequality are discussed in the final section of the article

Public and families : An introduction

xxviii, 572 h

Public and private families : a reader

xi, 381, 32 p. : col. ill. ; 24 cm