Sheela Kennedy

Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010

This article critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data have led some analysts to conclude that divorce has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the age composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over age 35. Among the youngest couples, however, divorce rates are stable or declining. If current trends continue, overall age-standardized divorce rates could level off or even decline over the next few decades. We argue that the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage.

The standard family life course : An assessment of variability in life course pathways

Despite dramatic changes in family life over the past several decades, survey data demonstrate that a ‘standard’ family life course remains a goal for the vast majority. The ideal family life course is to have a stable partnership with two or more children, and to have all of one’s children with the same partner. Achievement of a standard family life course may, however, depend on the opportunities and constraints encountered along one’s life path, in particular those associated with the pursuit and attainment of higher education. Analyses of survey data from France, Sweden and the United States document the family experiences to age 40 of persons born in the 1950s. Overall, about half of the cohorts had experienced a standard family life course. For women, education had both positive and negative influences – greater childlessness but more stable childbearing unions. For French and Swedish men, fatherhood and union stability were both associated with higher education. Educational differences in family transitions – especially childbearing out of union and dissolution of unions with children – are much greater in the U.S. than in the other countries, resulting in a significant educational gap in the likelihood of achieving a standard family life course that is not observed in Sweden or France.

A Geography of Cohabitation in the Americas, 1970–2010

In this chapter, we trace the geography of unmarried cohabitation in the Americas on an unprecedented geographical scale in family demography. We present the percentage of partnered women aged 25–29 in cohabitation across more than 19,000 local units of 39 countries, from Canada to Argentina, at two points in time, 2000 and 2010. The local geography is supplemented by a regional geography of cohabitation that covers five decades of data from 1960 to 2010. Our data derive primarily from the rich collection of census microdata amassed by the Centro Latinoamericano y Caribeno de Demografia (CELADE) of the United Nations and from the IPUMS-international collection of harmonized census microdata samples (Minnesota Population Center, Integrated public use microdata series, international: Version 6.3 [Machine-readable database]. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2014). Our analyses unveil a substantial amount of spatial heterogeneity both within and across countries. Despite the spectacular rise in cohabitation, its regional patterning has remained relatively unchanged over the last decades, which points to the presence of geo-historical legacies in the present patterns of unmarried cohabitation.