Social Integration, Heterogeneity, and Divorce: The Case of the Swedish-speaking Population in Finland

Abstract

The study compared marital stability in Finland with focus on the two language groups. The divorce rate was remarkably lower among the Swedish-speaking minority than among the Finnish-speaking majority. An explanation for this may be differences in social integration. The assumption about the effect of social integration was also supported by covariates measuring urbanization and individual migration. A hypothesis that marital homogamy reduces the divorce rate found support only with respect to the language of the spouses but not with respect to level of education or age.

A review of the antecedents of union dissolution

“…The rate for mixed couples was shown to be even slightly higher than for unilingual Finnish-speaking couples (Finnäs 1997).…”

“…Studies from Nordic countries have not found the risk of divorce to be especially high among educationally heterogamous couples (Finnäs 1997;Jalovaara 2003;Lyngstad 2004;Svarer and Verner 2006). In contrast, an earlier study from the United States reported a divorce-promoting effect of educational heterogamy (Tzeng 1992).…”

Migration and first-time parenthood

“…This approach was first proposed in a demographic study on neighboring Kazakhstan (Agadjanian and Qian 1997). For further examples of family-demographic studies where language use is applied as a marker of ethnicity, see, e.g., Finnäs (1997), Wetherell andPlakans (1997), andYavuz (2006).…”

Worldwide Census Data Reveal Prevalence of Educational Homogamy and Its Effect on Childlessness

“…Although religious homogamy seems to be particularly important for marital quality and stability (Call and Heaton, 1997;Myers, 2006), a stabilizing effect is known for educational homogamy as well (Weiss and Willis, 1997). Some argue, though, that marital stability is less a matter of similarity of educational attainment than whether or not spouses are highly or poorly educated (Finnäs, 1997;Charles and Stephens, 2004): the divorce risk is higher if at least one of the spouses is poorly educated (Weiss and Willis, 1997;Kraft and Neimann, 2009).…”