Parental education and family dissolution : a cross-national and cohort comparison

First published: 30 January 2018. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This is the first study to systematically analyze whether the association between parental education and family dissolution varies cross-nationally and over time. The authors use meta-analytic tools to study cross-national variation between 17 countries with data from the Generations and Gender Study and Harmonized Histories. The association shows considerable cross-national variation, but is positive in most countries. The association between parental education and family dissolution has become less positive or even negative in six countries. The findings show that the association between parental education and family dissolution is generally positive or nil, even if the association between own education and family dissolution is in many countries increasingly negative. The authors find suggestive evidence that the association is related to the crude divorce rate, but not to the generosity of the welfare state in these countries. The implications of these findings for understanding the stratification in family dissolution are discussed.Funded by European Research Council. Grant Number: 324178; Suomen Akatemia (Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland). Grant Number: 29310