Divorce among Sociologists Married to Sociologists

The Effects of Socioeconomic Heterogamy and Changes on Marital Dissolution for First Marriages

“…It has been suggested that wife's outside employment has generated both income and independent effects: On the one hand, wife's income contributes to the total family income, which helps to stabilize the marriage; on the other hand, wife's economic independence helps to terminate unhappy marriages (Becker, Landes, & Michael, 1977;Hannan, Tuma, & Groeneveld, 1977). Although the link between wife's outside employment and marital stability is still unclear, the degree of similarity in the employment status of husbands and wives may be related to marital instability because women's economic independence has altered characteristics of the marriage partnership such as marital interaction and division of household labor (Glenn & Keir, 1971;Spitze & South, 1985). In this paper, employment status is categorized thus: (1) the most conventional arrangement, where only the husband is employed full-time (working more than 40 weeks in the past calender year); (2) only the wife is employed full-time; (3) both are employed full-time; and (4) neither is employed full-time, to test whether the similarity between spouses' employment status and the changes of employment arrangement that occur after marriage endanger marital stability.…”