Marriage Dissolution in the United States: A Survival Analysis Approach

ABSTRACT

To estimate the survival time of marriages, we investigate influential factors, such as geographical area, educational level, income, children, ethnicity, and economic class, affecting marriages in the United States. Despite evidence that divorce has increased in the Unties States, research has not widely applied survival analysis which can evaluate several factors related to the divorce rate and marriage survival. Drawing from diverse areas of scholarship, we point out that divorce is circumstantial based on multiple social, cultural, and economic variables. Different survival analysis techniques were applied to predict divorce in the United States using a dataset, focusing on four different states, over a time period of 35 years. We discover that numerous social and economic factors drastically influence the survival time of a marriage. With respect to survival, having children decreases marriage survival and a high level of education or a high income increases marriage survival. Experimental results how that 51.4\% of the studied samples would experience divorce after 35 years of marriage. Applications of a survival analysis model has great potential in social science settings. Our findings suggest that wealth and education are key to understanding the greater longevity of marriage. A clear understanding of covariates and patterns, can in turn, help agencies to identify issues, predict future behavior, and enable them to provide proactive support for affected families.

KEYWORDS:

• Marriage dissolution
• martial data
• survival analysis
• United States

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ https://data.princeton.edu/pop509/divorce3.dta.

² www.census.gov/topics/families/marriage-and-divorce/data/tables.2017.html.