The Duration of Marriage in a Divorcing Population: The Impact of Children

Probability Models for Duration: The Data Don′t Tell the Whole Story

“…It is important that these right-censored observations are taken into account. Ignoring right-censored marriages, as was for instance done in Maneker and Rankin (1985) and Rankin and Maneker (1985), would not only result in discarding much of the data (75% in our case), but also lead to biased estimates of both the true divorce rate and the impact of the covariates of interest (Heckman & Singer, 1984a, 1984b.…”

Religious Affiliation and Marital Duration Among Those Who File for Divorce in California, 1966-1971

“…By way of contrast, percentages of marriages surviving five years or more range from the 60s to the low 80s. As noted in prcvious studies (Rankin and Mancker, 1985;Maneker and Rankin, 1987), presence of childrcn in a marriage correlates with longcr marriages. This may be true partly because prcsence of childrcn is more likely to come about as a marriage continues.…”

A Matter of Number, Age or Marriage? Children and Marital Dissolution in Italy

“…A shortcoming of these early studies is that other variables confounding the effect of children on marital stability are not controlled: mainly, these studies do not take into account marital duration, which strongly affects both marital stability and fertility behaviour. Several studies performed in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s (Morgan and Rindfuss 1985;Waite et al 1985;Rankin and Maneker 1985) show that using controls both for marital duration and for the most important determinants of marital disruption does not eliminate the difference in the rate of disruption between those with and those without children. 2 Becker et al (1977) find that children have a large effect on the stability of the parental marriage, although this effect is not linear with respect to the number of children: the first two children discourage divorce more than additional children do.…”