Routes to remarriage and subsequent (re)marital quality : does how you get there really matter?

Remarriage is a growing phenomenon that has reached an all-time high within the past few decades. While research on the marital quality of remarried couples has become common, existing remarriage literature has endlessly assessed remarried couples as a united and cohesive group, failing to distinguish between the various forms and complexities. Due to this lack of research, this study aims to investigate various forms of remarriage (e.g. serial/higher order marriage, remarriage through widowhood or divorce, and postmarital cohabitation as recoupling) in terms of relationship quality in order to clearly show that remarriage is not a simple union, but rather a complex form. Compared to those with a lower number of previous marriages, remarried persons who have a higher past number of marriages were hypothesized to experience lower marital quality. Widowers who remarry are also hypothesized to encompass higher levels of marital quality when compared to those who divorced and then remarried. And finally, persons who chose to cohabit post-divorce were compared to remarried persons, as a pure exploratory analysis. To assess marital quality three dimensions that have been well documented are used: divorce attitudes, marital interaction, and disagreements. Using the Canadian General Social Survey cycle 15: family history data set, logistic regression analyses are used for the two binary dependent variables (divorce attitudes and marital interaction) whereas multiple regression is used for the disagreement dependent variable. Overall findings indicated no support for any of the hypotheses once the control variables were added, however, postmarital cohabitors differed from remarried persons in terms of likelihood of divorce/breakup; there were no other significant differences between these groups. This study helped to explore a different way of looking at remarriage and these results suggest that more research is needed in order to investigate these variations of remarried unions on experiences of marital quality.Arts, Faculty ofSociology, Department ofGraduat