Nicholas Bautista

Divorce Rates Among Young Adults With Divorced Parents

Abstract

The question I am investigating is: Are young adults with divorced parents less likely than those with non-divorced parents to become divorced themselves? Looking into the literature review, I looked into how children are the closest people to the divorce while it is taking place. Some parents try to hide their fighting and divorce from their children, but most kids know when their parent’s relationship is stressed. Although not every divorce is damaging to a family, I want to see how divorces affects the children of the family. Looking into the methods and findings, I decided to work with Quantitative survey data analysis in order to find the answers for my question. I used this method to give myself a wide range of data answers to have the most diverse data I could find.

Using the National Longitudinal Surveys- NLS97, I was able to pull data from here and code them using SPSS to run different tests. Looking at this question I use the number of marriages a parent had while their children lived with them and also the age of the children at the time of the parent’s divorce. My sample is 8,984 participants, who are 51% male and 49% female. Being able to use a large survey size that was collected and processed over the years, it allows me to see how variables change overtime. I took a subsample from this large sample because I only picked out the variables that were related to divorce and involving the family. My findings suggest that people with one parent who’s divorced, does not make them less likely to have a divorce, it makes them just as likely as any other person.