Marriage Breakdown in Australia: social correlates, gender and initiator status.

This thesis investigates the social determinants of marriage breakdown in Australia. Research shows that a number of social characteristics including, birth cohort, ethnic background, parental divorce, family socioeconomic background, cohabitation, religiosity, premarital birth, early birth, marital children and education are associated with marriage breakdown. Using retrospective data on 8,993 first marriages from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey (2001), a large nationally representative Australian population survey, this study aims to develop our knowledge of gender differences in the social correlates of marriage breakdown and in particular to better understand why women are more likely than men to initiate separation. I do this in two ways. First, I use discrete time event history analysis to examine differences in the associations between mens and womens social characteristics and the probability of marriage breakdown. Overall these results suggest that social characteristics are important factors in predicting marriage breakdown. I find gender differences in the associations between age at marriage, ethnic background and education showing these characteristics have a stronger association with the probability of marriage breakdown for women than men. This may be because women are more likely to initiate separation. Second, I use discrete time event history analysis with competing risks to examine the associations between mens and womens social characteristics and their reports of which spouse initiated separation. Instead of treating marriage breakdown as a uniform event I investigate whether separation was initiated by the wife, husband or jointly. This issue has received little attention in the literature to date. My results suggest some differences in the associations between parental divorce, age at marriage, ethnic background, religiosity, and the presence of preschool and older children and whether wives or husbands initiated separation. All of these characteristics with the exception of the presence of preschool children increase the risk of wife-initiated separation, but overall there are few differences between wifeinitiated and husband-initiated separations and when there are significant differences it is usually in the magnitude of the effect rather than in the direction of the association. The main gender difference I find is that wives are more likely than husbands to initiate separation on the basis of their husbands as well as their own social characteristics. Overall, the findings of this thesis suggest three main conclusions. First, that sociostructural factors are important for understanding why some marriages break down and others remain intact. Second, wives are more likely to initiate marital separation than husbands. And third, while some gender differences in the social correlates of which spouse initiated separation are present, in general men and women tend to end their marriages under similar circumstances. It is likely that more wives initiate separation than husbands because women tend to take greater responsibility for the quality and maintenance of marital relationships which paradoxically entails ending an unhappy marriage in some circumstances. Investigating this issue further was outside the scope of this study and represents an important direction for future research