Effects of Divorce on Mental Health Through the Life Course

The long-term effects of divorce on individuals after the transition to adulthood are examined using information from a British birth cohort that has been followed from birth to age 33. Growth-curve models and fixed-effects models are estimated. The results suggest that part of the seeming effect of parental divorce on adults is a result of factors that were present before the parents’ marriages dissolved. But in addition, the results also suggest that there is an effect of the divorce and its aftermath on adult mental health. Moreover, a parental divorce during childhood or adolescence appears to continue to have a negative effect when a person is in his or her twenties and early thirties. Effects of Divorce on Mental Health Through the Life Course Although there is now a substantial literature on the effects of divorce on children and young adults, information about the long-term effects of divorce after the transition to adulthood is less comprehensive. We lack adequate knowledge of the patterns of continuing effects, if any, of a parental divorce during the adult life course. To be sure, there are studies that extend to older ages (Amato and Keith, 1991a); and these show that parental divorce appears to have an effect on outcomes such as lower psychological well-being (Glenn and Kramer, 1985), more depressive symptoms (Crook and Raskin, 1975; Roy, 1985), having an income below the poverty line (McLanahan, 1985), and a greater likelihood of becoming divorced (Bumpass et al., 1991). But the vast majority of these studies of adults are based on cross-sectional surveys in which individuals retrospectively report their family structure. Moreover, most studies address young adulthood. Consequently, the inferences we can draw about patterns of effects into midlife are limited. For the purposes of this article, let us consider three time periods in which the effects of a parental divorce during childhood can be manifest. The first period is the time between the individual’s birth and the point at which his or her parents separate. 2 Effects of divorce Prospective studies of children (e.g., longitudinal studies that begin before the children’s parents divorce---see Block et. al, 1986; Cherlin et al., 1991) suggest that some of the differences between children who would later experience parental divorce versus those who would not were observable before any of the divorces occurred. We will call these differences pre-disruption effects. They cannot be due to the disruption itself because it has not yet happened. Rather, they may be caused by parental conflict prior to the disruption; or they may indicate characteristics of the children or their parents that have influenced both their parents’ marriages and their own lives. These pre-disruption differences could still be visible in adulthood. For example, a shared genetic tendency in a family, such as a history of depression, could contribute both to parents' marital distress and divorce as well as to children’s depression in young adulthood, thus giving the misleading impression that the parental divorce caused the depression. The second period is the time between a parental divorce and the end of the transition to adulthood. This period has been the most widely studied (Amato and Keith, 1991b). Many articles and books demonstrate associations between parental divorce and aspects of the transition to adulthood, such as lower educational attainment and early childbearing (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994), and more premarital cohabitation (Thornton, 1991). The few prospective studies that extend to young adulthood indicate that these associations persist even after taking into account measured pre-disruption differences between the divorced an not-divorced groups 3 Effects of divorce (Cherlin et al. , 1995). Chase-Lansdale et al. (1995) found that experiencing a parental divorce before age 16 was associated with poorer mental health in a large sample of 23-year-olds, even controlling for measured pre-disruption differences. The third period is the time after the transition to adulthood--after the completion of school, entry into the labor force and, for many, entry into marriage, i.e., midlife in the adult life course. A key question regarding this time period is whether the effects of the disruption, if any, diminish or stabilize after the transition to adulthood or whether the effects of disruption may increase as adults from divorced families enter their 30s. If the former were true, then we might expect that the life course of adults from divorced families who successfully navigate the waters of young adulthood would differ little from adults whose parents’ marriages had remained intact. In other words, if the effect of parental divorce on the life course is confined largely to events that occur in childhood and adolescence, then its significance is mainly to alter life course trajectories before adulthood. If, in contrast, a parental marital disruption experienced in childhood continues to exert an effect, it may alter mid-life-course trajectories as well. The study we report in this article is an attempt to increase our knowledge about the effects of a childhood parental divorce on adults. We use a prospective, longitudinal design to analyze information on measures of mental health--behavior problems and malaise--from a unique, large study of British individuals who have been followed since their birth in 1958 and who were last interviewed at age 33 in 4 Effects of divorce 1991. By age 33, virtually all of the sample had completed their full-time education, 83 percent had ever married, and 67 percent had had a child (Ferri, 1993). The data set is of interest because its depth and breadth are unusual for survey research. Moreover, this data set has also been central to the recent literature, although this is the first U.S. article to report on the age 33 wave. Earlier waves have been used to claim support for pre-disruption effects (Cherlin et al., 1991), in that the behavior problems of 7-year-old boys whose parents would divorce in next four years were observably greater than the behavior problems of those whose parents would remain together. The surveys also have been used to claim support for the effect of the disruption itself and its aftermath, in that the negative effects of parental divorce before age 16 on mental health and life transitions at age 23 were statistically significant even controlling for pre-disruption child and family characteristics (Chase-Lansdale et al, 1995; Cherlin et al., 1995). Can predisruption characteristics account for much of the apparent effects of divorce at ages 7 to 11 but not at age 23 in the same individuals? In previous work, (e.g., Chase-Lansdale et al., 1995), it has been argued that these findings are not necessarily contradictory. In the present study, we aim to integrate these disparate findings by tracing the path of the effects of divorce on indicators of mental health during the entire sweep of the British study: from age 7--the first time behavioral information was collected--through assessments at ages 11, 16, 23, and 33. To do so, we present estimates from growth-curve models and fixed-effects models, both of 5 Effects of divorce which can be applied to what is referred to as panel data--longitudinal data in which a cross-section of individuals is repeatedly interviewed. In both models, the outcome variables are measures of emotional problems at each wave. We will first present estimates from the growth-curve models, which belong to a larger class of models for panel data called random-effects models; then we will present estimates from the fixed-effects models. Growth curve analysis is presented in texts on hierarchical models that are well-known to sociologists (e.g., Bryk and Raudenbush, 1992); but it has been used primarily by psychologists (Ragosa, Brandt, and Zimowski, 1982; Burchinal and Appelbaum, 1991; Willett, Ayoub, and Robinson, 1991). A recent application is to job-related psychological distress among dual-career married couples (Barnett et al., 1993, 1995). To our knowledge, no articles using growth-curve models have been published in mainstream sociology journals. 1 Random-effects and fixed-effects models make different assumptions about unobservable sources of variation and typically use the information in the data in somewhat different ways. Both kinds of models correct for the non-independence of the error terms in multiple observations on the same individual. Random-effects models assume that unobserved person-specific characteristics are uncorrelated with observed characteristics, whereas fixed effects models relax that assumption for timeinvariant unobserved characteristics (Allison, 1994; Johnson, 1995). In our application unobserved characteristics such as a shared predisposition toward depression could be correlated with observed characteristics such as parental divorce, 6 Effects of divorce which implies that fixed-effects models could be more appropriate. Moreover, fixedeffects models produce parameter estimates that control for unobserved characteristics that do not change over time. On the other hand, fixed effect models cannot separate out the main effects of observed characteristics that do not change over time, such as gender, from the unobserved characteristics. Substantively, the main difference between the two models in this application is in the treatment of variables measuring parental divorce. In the growth-curve models, a set of dummy variables for age at parental divorce is taken as time-invariant. In other words, at every wave a given individual has the same scores on the set of dummy variables (e.g., a divorce never occurred, a divorce occurred between ages 7 and 10, a divorce occurred between ages of 11 and 15, etc.), no matter whether the wave occurred prior to or after the divorce. This specification allows us to estimate and to graph trajectories of mental health over