Women's Repartnering After Divorce

• In Event: 3523 - Family Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 3: Divorce/Relationship Dissolution

Abstract

Objective: This paper studies the trajectory, pace, and variant of repartnering for young adult women who first divorced since 2000 in the U.S.
Background: High divorce rate in the U.S. portends huge growth in women’s repartnering, yet we know little about the mechanisms and inequalities undergirding women’s decisions to form a repartnership, especially cohabitation. Limited research has employed the marital search theory to test mechanisms of need, attractiveness, and opportunity in repartnering.
Method: Data is drawn from the most recent retrospective data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) 2011-17. Sample includes 1,595 young adult women (or 7,127 person-years) who first divorced since 2000. Methodologies adopted are (multiple-decrement) life table and discrete-time event-history analysis.
Results: Among young women divorcees, the rate of repartnering is relatively low within three years of divorce, though it increases within ten years. Cohabitation is a quicker choice than remarriage shortly after divorce, but remarriage is overall more prevalent. There are substantial inequalities in the repartnering patterns: older, non-White women with low education and more children are significantly less likely to remarry than their counterparts, whereas younger women with low education are substantially more likely to cohabit after divorce.
Conclusion: This paper suggests that repartnering constructs an important and understudied channel through which existing economic and social inequalities are transmitted and reproduced.
 

Author

• Haoming Song, Brown University