Disruption of Marital and Cohabitation Relationships: A Social Demographic Perspective

Abstract

In social demography, there is a long tradition of research on marriage, marital disruption, and remarriage. (See Sweet, 1977, for a review of this tradition.) Research in this area has accelerated greatly since the early 1970s, resulting in an immense increase in our understanding of marriage behavior. A number of factors have contributed to this growth. The growth of social welfare programs and concern for the well-being of children, particularly those growing up in single-parent families, have made family processes increasingly relevant to social policy. Scientific interest in marital processes has grown with the diffusion of the life-course perspective in social science and with the realization that marital and family experience has a profound influence on experience in other life domains. At the same time, an expansion in the amount of available data, particularly retrospective and longitudinal data on family experience, has broadened the range of issues that can be addressed empirically. Developments in analytic methodology have improved our ability to use these new data to speak more directly to important scientific and policy questions.