Educational Gradients in Divorce Risks in Sweden in Recent Decades.

Many investigators have found that divorce risks decrease as you move from groups with little educational or social capital to groups with more. This negative educational gradient fits with the notion that people with more education are better at selecting spouses and better at making a marriage work. Other investigators have found a positive gradient, often in populations where the situation is dominated by the individual's ability to handle the divorce process and to cope with the economic and other problems that follow in the wake of a divorce. The sign of the educational gradient in divorce risks seems to depend on the balance between countervailing influences. Information about the gradient over a few educational levels is about as much as you can expect to get from the interview data of a normal-sized general survey. With access to the data from a full-coverage system of the population and educational registers of a sizeable population like that of Sweden, educational effects can be studied in much greater detail. We begin to tap this source in the present paper. When we do, the educational gradient in divorce risks turns out to be too slippery a basis for the general theories that have been developed around it so far, at least in a population where it is reasonably easy to get a divorce and where the hurtful consequences to the divorcees are more limited than elsewhere. There has been no uniform relation between educational level and divorce risk of Swedish women at the various educational levels during the 1970s and 1980s; developments in recent decades in Swedish first-marriage divorce risks have been much more favourable to the more highly educated than to women with less education, and the result is that the educational gradient has become negative as we leave the 1980s. The educational gradient changed sign correspondingly between cohorts born in the mid-1940s and cohorts from the mid-1960s. In a society such... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]