Twins or two single children: The influence of the multiplicity of the first birth on the divorce risk of Swedish women

Rainer Walke

Volume 7 - Article 9 | Pages 379–390

Twins or two single children: The influence of the multiplicity of the first birth on the divorce risk of Swedish women

By Rainer Walke

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Date received:	04 Sep 2001
Date published:	20 Aug 2002
Word count:	2344
Keywords:	birth interval, data analysis, divorce, event history analysis, parity, Sweden
DOI:	10.4054/DemRes.2002.7.9

Abstract

Based on Swedish register data, we compared the influence of a twin birth on the divorce risk with the influence of the sequential birth of two single children.
The divorce risk for a woman with a very young child was lower than the risk for women without children or women with children older than 3.5 years. This behaviour was essentially independent of the number of children and whether or not the woman gave birth to twins. The effect of parity was much smaller than the effect of child age. The influence of twins on the divorce risk appeared to fall between that of a first and a second singleton.