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Do Parents of Girls Have a Higher Risk of Divorce? An Eighteen‐Country Study
Author(s) -
Diekmann Andreas,
Schmidheiny Kurt
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of marriage and family
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.578
H-Index - 159
eISSN - 1741-3737
pISSN - 0022-2445
DOI - 10.1111/j.0022-2445.2004.00044.x
Subject(s) - national survey of family growth , fertility , daughter , psychology , demography , population , survey data collection , marital separation , demographic economics , developmental psychology , social psychology , research methodology , family planning , sociology , political science , economics , statistics , mathematics , law
Using data from the June 1980 Current Population Survey, Morgan, Lye, and Condran (1988) reported that families with a daughter have a higher divorce risk than families with a son. They attribute this finding to the higher involvement of fathers in raising a son, which in turn promotes marital stability. We investigate the relation between gender composition of children and parents’ divorce risk with cross‐national data from the Fertility and Family Survey. These data, which cover 16 European countries, Canada, and the United States, do not support a general hypothesis that sons contribute more to marital stability than daughters.