Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too:

Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years.

by Rose McDermott, Brown University; James H. Fowler, University of California, San Diego; Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard University. Contact information is at the end of the study.

Abstract

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced.

Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

We excerpted some other segments in the report aside from the abstract quoted above:

Network Structure and Divorce

The existing literature on divorce offers some evidence regarding the impact of social support networks on the likelihood of marital rupture. This includes work examining the effect of the number of unique friends and the number of shared friends on the probability of divorce. Some work suggests that spouses who share the same friends are less likely to get divorced than those who do not. Other research from a nationally representative sample indicates that weaker network ties to one’s spouse increase chances for marital infidelity, a factor that predisposes partners to divorce (Treas & Giesen, 2000). Yet such relationships are neither simple nor straightforward in nature. As Booth et al. write: "simple embeddedness in the social fabric of society may not be sufficient to explain why some marriages endure and others break up."

To examine more subtle aspects of the influence of networks on marriage, additional work has explored a more nuanced characterization of social network support, examining different types of relationships. Bryant & Conger (1999) studied three types of influence to examine whether network support helps encourage a couple to stay together or instead drives them apart. First, they studied outside support for the relationship from friends and family to see whether approval for the relationship provides an important predictor of relationship success, as some earlier work suggested (Johnson & Milardo, 1984). Second, they examined whether shared social networks enhanced marital satisfaction, including whether liking each other’s friends can improve marital happiness. Last, they investigated whether personal support within the relationship improved chances for marital success. An important aspect of this last component relates to a sense of reciprocal equality in the relationship, or whether one person feels he or she gives more than the other within the context of the marriage. Interestingly, only outside support from friends and family predicted marital success in the time period examined. However, the authors suggest an endogenous [definition: caused by factors inside the organism or system] mechanism is at work among those who achieve success in relationships: "The greater the feelings of satisfaction, stability and commitment that partners have for their relationships, the greater the evidence for supportive extramarital relationships. In turn, the more supportive network members are, the greater are feelings of satisfaction, stability and commitment that partners have for their marital relationships."

Only one longitudinal panel study (Booth et al., 1991) has addressed the question of whether a greater number of social ties, and more frequent interaction among them, decreases the likelihood of divorce. The authors of this study defined communicative integration as the degree to which individuals remain embedded in a large social network and normative integation as a lack of divorce among one’s reference group members. They found a small negative effect of communicative integration on divorce, but only for those who had been married less than seven years. Importantly, they found that normative integration reduced the likelihood of divorce, regardless of how long people had been married: "When one’s reference group includes siblings or friends who have divorced, the individual is more likely to divorce."(221).

The entire report can be viewed at the Social Science Research Network

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Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too:

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