Two Spouses, One Divorce

Amy Godecker, University of California, San Francisco

This paper draws on several chapters of my (completed) dissertation. An abstract follows below, and the full text will follow via US mail. I plan on revising the analyses and text based on comments from my committee and would also appreciate feedback from PAA participants prior to submission for publication. In particular, I plan on exploring alternative specifications of the marital quality scale and alternative models. I also plan on incorporating a probit analysis predicting participation in NSFH Wave 2, correlating the error term of the models to correct for unmeasured heterogeneity in the models currently included. Additional refinements may also be necessary, and I may include some analyses from a subsequent chapter which predicted which spouse wanted the separation or dissolution more. Marital quality is an important determinant of marital stability. However, much research on this topic is limited by inattention to the gendered characteristics of intimate relationships and a recognition that marriage and divorce arise from the emotions and behaviors of two people. Women and men have different interests in marriage and divorce and women may be more influential in driving the process of marital dissolution than men. I address some limitations of previous research by examining whether wives’ and husbands’ independent and joint evaluations of their relationships have different effects on marital stability. I use the National Survey of Families and Households in a prospective analysis of marital dissolution over a 5 to 7 year period. Of the 5765 couples included in analyses, approximately 12 percent (687 couples) separated or divorced between Waves 1 and 2 of the survey. After factor analyses of relationship assessment items, I create a marital quality scale using several items used separately by other researchers—with conflicting results—to form a more reliable measure of the underlying construct of marital quality. I find that wives and husbands have similar perceptions of the quality of their relationships both on average and within couples. Results from piecewise linear hazard models show that wives’ perceptions of marital quality have a stronger effect than husbands’ perceptions on the likelihood that couples separate or divorce, but that husbands’ marital quality is important as well. Couples in which both spouses perceive a poor-quality marriage have a high risk of dissolution: couples in which both spouses are in the lowest third of the distribution of perceptions of marital quality have dissolution rates approximately 2.2 times higher than couples in which both spouses are in the middle third of the marital quality distribution. Couples in which both spouses perceive relatively better-quality marriages have dissolution rates half that of couples with more moderate perceptions of the quality of their marriage. Marriages do, however, often end through the desire of a single spouse, particularly when the wife is dissatisfied with the quality of the relationship. When wives perceive poor quality relationships and husbands perceive moderate quality relationships, the risk of divorce is somewhat higher than when both spouses perceive moderate quality relationships. Couples in which wives and husbands have more disparate views of the relationship have even higher rates of dissolution. When wives perceive poor quality relationships but husbands perceive high quality relationships, the risk of dissolution is approximately 2.3 times higher than when both spouses perceive moderate quality relationships. The same pattern is seen when wives’ and husbands’ perceptions of marital quality are reversed, but effects are not as strong. I discuss these findings in social-psychological terms and in relation to Berger and Kellner’s (1974) theory of marriage as a socially-constructed reality.