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Purpose – This chapter examines change over time in income, human capital, and socio-demographic attributes for married, divorced, and never-married mothers

Methodology/approach – The chapter consists of descriptive analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1979 cohort. Respondents were followed from 1979 to 2006.

Findings – The economic consequences of single motherhood are persistent. Women who have once been divorced or never-married mothers remain poorer through middle age, no matter how their family structure subsequently changes.

Social implications – A critical feature of the modern economic and demographic landscape is the intersection of individual and family characteristics. Many divorced and, especially, never-married mothers experience profound disadvantage even before they become mothers. Single mothers in general are far less likely to have college degrees, and, in the case of never-married mothers less likely to even have a high school diploma. Never-married mothers are also much less likely to be employed. Single mothers have less educated parents, and are themselves more likely to come from nonintact families. All of these disadvantages contribute to the economic costs – and the economic stress – of single motherhood.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter demonstrates that single mothers comprise two very different populations, divorced and never-married mothers. However, both are at a substantial disadvantage compared to married mothers.

Studies on remarriages based on census data are not available in Bangladesh. Moreover, questions like why the remarriage rate is declining in Bangladesh despite the increasing trend of divorce rate and what factors are associated with this declining trend of remarriage are not answered yet. Thus the purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of divorces and the extent to which this has influenced the likelihood of remarriage in Bangladesh.

Univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses have been performed by analyzing the most recent and largest sample census data of ever married men and women aged 10 years and above collected in 2011.

The prevalence of remarriage is low in Bangladesh but more common in rural places of residence, substantially larger in slums when compared with non-slums, among Bengali ethnic people, rent-free tenancy, the age group of 45 years and over, the male population, people of Muslim religion, who have no education, and poorest wealth quintile. Muslim religion, slum dwelling status, employed status, media exposure, and urban residence stand out as the major determinants in terms of remarriage. Women having higher education and the richest quintile of households are less likely to be remarried than those who have lower education and are from the poorest wealth quintile background. Males who remarry also followed the same pattern. But remarriage is higher among both the divorced males and females as compared to widowed males and females. Strategic targeting and responsive social policies are needed to be implemented toward the differential pattern of remarriage by sub-groups of the population and their vulnerabilities in relation to their marital status and marital relation, to understand remarriage dynamics in Bangladesh.

In this study, we ask whether economic factors that can be directly manipulated by public policy have important effects on the probability that women experience long-lasting unions. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we estimate a five-stage sequential choice model for women's transitions between single with no prior unions, cohabiting, first-married, re-single (divorced or separated), and remarried. We control for expected income tax burdens, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, Medicaid expenditures, and parameters of state divorce laws, along with an array of demographic, family background, and market factors. We simulate women's sequences of transitions from age 18 to 48 and use the simulated outcomes to predict the probability that a woman with given characteristics (a) forms a first union by age 24 and maintains the union for at least 12 years, and (b) forms a second union by age 36 and maintains it for at least 12 years. While non-policy factors such as race and schooling prove to have important effects on the predicted probabilities of long-term unions, the policy factors have small and/or imprecisely estimated effects; in short, we fail to identify policy mechanisms that could potentially be used to incentivize long-term unions.

This chapter focuses on the heterogeneous pathways (including marital and cohabiting union and parenting histories) through which people navigate their family life courses from adolescence through mid-life, and their implications for union dissolution in middle and later life. The analyses draw on data (retrospective, cross-sectional) from the 2011 and 2017 Canadian General Social Surveys. The study sample includes individuals aged 50 and over (n = 14,547) who were in a union at age 50. Sequence analyses are used to identify the most common family life course trajectories among these individuals from adolescence through midlife (ages 15–50). Logistic regression analyses then address the implications of these trajectories for union dissolution in middle and later life (ages 50+). The results reveal four main family trajectories that characterize the earlier years of the adult life course: married with children, cohabiting with children, single or cohabiting without children, and married without children. These family trajectories, together with their level of complexity, play an important role in relation to both marital and cohabiting union dissolution outcomes in later life.

The chapter by Dronkers and Hox presents an interesting multi-level event history analysis of divorce risks. The sibling design gives excellent opportunities for studying the similarity between brothers and sisters in the risks of divorce. Various discussion points are raised, all of which bear in some way upon the choice of predictor variables in the multi-level logistic regression. Questions are posed about the level of detail of modeling time trends; about the fact that sampling weights are a function of number of siblings; and about the inclusion in the fixed part of the model of the fraction of previously divorced siblings, which is correlated with the family-level random intercept.

Life in Slovakia, as in most European countries, was formed under the strong influence of Christianity. It influenced the standards of society and determined general behaviour, relationships among people, and especially family life. Christianity emphasised long-term low mobility, resulting in a strong traditionalism that persists in many spheres of life today.

Gender analysis of the narratives of low-income divorcées in big cities of Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir shows that their lives are under patriarchal domination. Women are subjected to all kinds of violence in their marriage and escape it by getting a divorce. Their lives are vulnerable as the increasing numbers of lone mothers are neither morally nor socially accepted in Turkish society. The patriarchal family ideal exacerbates the situation of lone mothers who become stigmatized as divorcées. Divorce is considered a ‘shame’ for women, and the ideology of family is used as a political tool where persistent conservative bias ignores wife battering, rape and other types of abuse in society.