Accounting for Divorce in Marital Research: An Application to Growth Mixture Modeling

Abstract

Objective:The goal of this study was to understand the implications of omitting versus retaining individuals known to eventually divorce in the longitudinal modeling of marital quality trajectories. Background: Change in marital quality has been the focus of basic and applied research as well as policy initiatives for the past several decades. Scholars have used group-based modeling techniques to better understand how enduring marriages develop over time. Previous studies, however, have not directly examined the implications of including versus excluding individuals who go on to divorce for shape or number of identified marital development trajectories. Method: The present study used growth mixture modeling and the Marital Instability over the Life Course data set to examine patterns of marital happiness. Analyses were first conducted only on continuously married men (n = 269) and women (n = 438). Identical analytic procedures were then used with combined samples of those who were continuously married plus those who eventually divorced (n = 358 men; n = 588 women). Results: The results indicated that retaining those who go on to divorce increased the number of classes reported and changed the

Patterning of midlife marital trajectories in enduring marriages in a dyadic context: Physical and mental health outcomes in later years

“…It seems that adding divorced couples creates additional classes with different patterns. Overall, for our purpose, this supplementary analysis indicates that when divorced couples are included in the class analysis, a different class solution is produced, which is consistent with previous research (Kanter et al, 2019). Because we were able to analyze health outcomes in 2015 only for individuals in enduring marriages, we proceeded with the 4-class solution based on marital experiences of individuals in continually married couples.…”

Trajectories of Marital Satisfaction in Diverse Newlywed Couples

“…In this analytic approach, BIC is always negative, and greater values (i.e., less negative) indicate better fit (Nagin, 1999). We established a priori that we would choose the number of groups at which the BIC value was the greatest, provided that the smallest group constituted at least 6% of the sample (approximately 25 individuals) to be consistent with previous research which allowed for groups no smaller than this size (e.g., Kanter, Proulx, & Monk, 2018; Lavner et al, 2012).…”

Marital Satisfaction and Depressive Symptoms Among Korean Couples With Young Children: Dyadic Autoregressive Cross‐Lagged Modeling

“…Finally, the samples in this study are all different‐sex couples who maintain their marriages. Given that exclusion of individuals who divorce or separate may lead to more stability in and higher levels of marital quality and limit sample diversity (e.g., Carlson & VanOrman, 2017; Kanter et al, 2019) and same‐ and different‐sex marriages have different associations between relationships and psychological distress (Monk et al, 2018), the findings should be limited to different‐sex couples who are married.…”