Predicting the Divorce Rate

Abstract

Although the divorce rate is relatively high at present, it has reached what appears to be a plateau and there are some reasons for thinking that it will begin to decrease in the near future. Ten grounds for such a conclusion are cited here: decline in marriage rate; older age at marriage; higher proportion of single persons; mental health improvement in the population; upper limit on women in the labor force; slowdown in geographic mobility; end of the “cultural revolution”; end of “anomie of affluence”; exhaustion of latency effect of no-fault divorce laws; and a growing fear of the consequences of divorce. As with all predictions, the underlying assumption is that these causal conditions will continue for some time.