The Role of Divorce Across Cohorts in the Multiplexity of Social Support Networks

• In Event: 4266 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 8. Social and Familial Support

Abstract

Historical rates of divorce and separation show an almost quadrupling of divorce from 1880 to 1990, with rates doubling from 1960 to 1990 for age-standardized rates (Ruggles 1997). These rates continued to increase from 1990 to 2010, but among youngest couples, divorce rates have remained stable or are declining (Kennedy and Ruggles 2014). Given these drastic changes from 1960 to the present, this study is uniquely situated to examine the effects of divorce using UCNets, data sampled on cohorts aged 21-30 and 50-70. There is evidence that divorce continues to affect children in a variety of ways twenty years onwards (Ahrons 2007). Yet, we know relatively little about how parental divorce impacts social networks of adult children. My study addresses this issue, investigating how parental divorce impacts social network ties and multiplexity in a sample of 21-30-year-olds and 50-70-year-olds. My findings show that divorce does have a significant effect on multiplexity, indicating that individuals who experienced parental divorce have more overlapping networks while those who did not draw on different people for different support. Because this analysis does not look at types of multiplexity, to see overlap between certain networks, I am unable to make predictions as to the nature of the relationship between parental divorce and multiplexity. Lastly, there is a marginally significant interaction between cohort and parental divorce status for multiplexity, which indicates that parental divorce is differentially impacting different cohorts, likely due to cultural, age, and recency differences in the experience of parental divorce.

Author

• Kelsey Nilsson Mattingly, University of Georgia