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Title: Rethinking the Case Against Divorce
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Li, Jui-Chung Allen |
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Rethinking the Case Against Divorce Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, May 2007 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Children, Well-Being; Divorce; Factorial Survey Method / Vignette Method / Simulations; Gender Differences; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Marital Disruption; Marital Status; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Propensity Scores; Racial Differences Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In this dissertation, I reconsider the case against divorce (1) by examining the effects of divorce on the well-being of children and adults and on the cultural beliefs concerning family migration decisions in three empirical studies, and (2) by making two methodological contributions that help unravel the several puzzles in the empirical analyses of this dissertation. In the first study, I examine children's emotional well-being, measured by behavior problems. Using panel data from the mother-child sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and fixed-effects and random-trends models to control for selection on unobservables, I find that there is no effect of divorce on behavior problems for children of divorce. In the second study, I discuss methodological issues and describe a propensity score method for studying the effect of an event. I then apply this method in examining the effect of divorce on health using data from the adult sample of the NLSY79. I find that divorce has a negative effect on mental health for both divorced men and women. Divorce also has a negative effect on divorced women's physical health and general health status, but no effect on divorced men's physical health and general health status. In the third study, I develop a "computerized multivariate factorial survey" vignette method for studying the interrelated sociopsychological processes. I then apply this method in examining cultural beliefs concerning marriage prospects and family migration decisions. I probe what a convenience sample of respondents believe the probability of divorce for fictitious couples would be and what they believe the same fictitious couples would do when one spouse receives a job offer that requires moving to another city. Using simultaneous-equation models with correlated errors, I find that the respondents are more likely to believe that a fictitious couple would choose to live apart for work, if the respondents also believe that the same couple has a higher probability of divorcing within five years. I also find a gender asymmetry in respondents' beliefs, with respondents seeing a fictitious couple as more likely to take a job offer and move when the husband, rather than the wife, receives the job offer. |
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Bibliography Citation
Li, Jui-Chung Allen. Rethinking the Case Against Divorce. Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, May 2007. |