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 m ore. This negative educational gradient fits with the notion that peop le with more education are better at selecting spouses and better at m aking a marriage work. Other investigators have found a positive gradi ent, often in populations where the situation is dominated by the indi vidual's ability to handle the divorce process and to cope with the ec onomic and other problems that follow in the wake of a divorce. The si gn of the educational gradient in divorce risks seems to depend on the balance between countervailing influences, Information about the grad ient 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 e ducational registers of a sizeable population like that of Sweden, edu cational effects can be studied in much greater detail. We begin to ta p this source in the present paper. When we do, the educational gradie nt in divorce risks turns out to be too slippery a basis for the gener al theories that have been developed around it so far, at least in a p opulation where it is reasonably easy to get a divorce and where the h urtful consequences to the divorcees are more limited than elsewhere. There has been no uniform relation between educational level and divor ce risk of Swedish women at the various educational levels during the 1970s and 1980s; developments in recent decades in Swedish first-marri age divorce risks have been much more favourable to the more highly ed ucated than to women with less education, and the result is that the e ducational gradient has become negative as we leave the 1980s. The edu cational gradient changed sign correspondingly between cohorts born in the mid-1940s and cohorts from the mid-1960s. In a society such as Sw eden, it may be more important to explain the trends in divorce risks by educational level than to explain the gradient of educational effec ts. Most normal-sized data sets are too small to permit the inclusion of secular changes in the effect of education on divorce rates, so ana lysts risk working with a seriously mis-specified model if real educat ional impacts change over time.