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Research on divorce during the past decade has focused on a range of topics, including the predictors of divorce, associations between divorce and the well-being of children and former spouses, and interventions for divorcing couples. Methodological advances during the past decade include a greater reliance on nationally representative longitudinal samples, genetically informed designs, and statistical models that control for time-invariant sources of unobserved heterogeneity. Emerging perspectives, such as a focus on the number of family transitions rather than on divorce as a single event, are promising. Nevertheless, gaps remain in the research literature, and the review concludes with suggestions for new studies.
Key Words: adult outcomes, child/adolescent outcomes, demography, divorce, family policy.
Divorce continues to be a major topic of scholarly interest. A search using the ISI Web of Science bibliographic database in August 2009 revealed a total of 1,980 articles published in social science journals since (and including) 2000 that listed divorce as a key topic. Given the large amount of published material, many high-quality studies conducted during the last decade do not appear in this review. In addition, I omitted studies of "informal divorces" among unmarried cohabiting parents. Although a large proportion of cohabiting unions end in disruption, this topic is beyond the scope of the current review. Readers should note that the majority of marital separations end relatively quickly in reconciliation or dissolution. For this reason, most of the research described herein does not distinguish between separation and divorce. This article begins with an update on the demography of divorce. I then discuss topics that have received the most attention from researchers during the last decade: predictors of divorce, associations between divorce and the well-being of children and former spouses, and interventions for divorcing families. The final section provides suggestions for future studies.
DEMOGRAPHY OF DIVORCE: DIVORCE IN THE UNITED STATES
Determining how common divorce is would seem to be a straightforward task. Unfortunately, several states do not submit vital statistics on divorce to the federal government on a regular basis. For example, in 2004, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, and Louisiana did not report this information. For this reason, we do not have a complete count of how many divorces occur in the United States annually. Nor do we have...