Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Adult children of divorced parents; Marital status; Academic theses;

Abstract

The purpose of this quantitative study is to examine the question does parental divorce during childhood influences the marital status of the child in adulthood? The data used in the present study come from a random representative national sample and was originally collected by Bumpass and Sweet (1988) for national use. The total sample size for the present study is 5027. It is hypothesized for this study that parental divorce will influence a child's martial status in adulthood. It is also expected that gender, race, and cohabitational history will interact with parental marital status and influence the marital status of the adult child. It is also expected that for those children who come from divorced homes, the age at the time of the parental divorce, having step-parents and having multiple parental divorces will have an influence on their marital status. Akers' (1985) version of Social Learning Theory is used to guide the study. The methods of analysis for this study include univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses. It is found that parental marital status is weakly associated with child's marital status. None of sub-hypotheses are found to be true. Yet a direct relationship is found between gender and child's marital status, also a direct relationship is found between cohabitational history and child's marital status.

Year of Submission

2005

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology

First Advisor

Kristin Y. Mack

Second Advisor

B. Keith Crew

Third Advisor

Gene Lutz

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2005

Object Description

1 PDF file (94 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Included in

Sociology Commons

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