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We used data on women's first marriages from the Fertility and Family Surveys to analyse the intergenerational transmission of divorce across 18 countries and to seek explanations in macro-level characteristics for the cross-national variation. Our results show that women whose parents divorced have a significantly higher risk of divorce in 17 countries. There is some cross-national variation. When compared with the USA, the association is stronger in six countries. This variation is negatively associated with the proportion of women in each cohort who experienced the divorce of their parents and with the national level of women's participation in the labour force during childhood. We conclude that differences in the contexts in which children of divorce learn marital and interpersonal behaviour affect the strength of the intergenerational transmission of divorce.
Notes
1. Jaap Dronkers is Professor of Social Stratification and Inequality at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Via dei Roccettini 9, 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. E-mail: jaap.dronkers@eui.eu; Tel.: +39-055-468-5260; Fax: +39-055-468-5201; Homepage: http://www.eui.eu/Personal/Dronkers/
2. Juho Härkönen is Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Research on Social Inequalities and the Life Course, Department of Sociology, Yale University, PO Box 208265, New Haven, CT 06520-8265, USA. E-mail: juho.harkonen@yale.edu; Tel.: +1-203-432-5281; Fax: +1-203-432-6976; Homepage: http://www.yale.edu/ciqle/juho
3. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Fourth Conference of the European Network for the Sociological and Demographic Study of Divorce ‘Family Dynamics and Family Structures in a Comparative Perspective’, 22–24 June 2006, in Florence, Italy. We thank the anonymous reviewers for very insightful comments.