Estimation of duration of separation, widowhood, and family life cycle (Q1281369)

This is a report on a study of the durations related to marriage. Divorce and death of one's spouse are two of the most important events in a person's life. Their occurrence almost always means a change of lifestyle for the persons involved, from a married life to that of divorced or widowed. Adjustments need be made for changes in emotional condition, and possibly also in financial status. The influence often extends to the children. In this paper, duration of separation due to divorce and duration of widowhood are the main quantities under study. Formulas are derived for their expectations, or the mean values, as functions of the initial ages of a couple. These formulas will serve as an analytic basis for making inference regarding the expectations of these durations for a particular population, or in an analysis of trend. The paper should be useful to social scientists in their projection and to government agencies in their planning for the needs of people in these specific categories. The terms marriage and divorce are liberally interpreted in this study; union of two people need not be through marriage. The algebraic formulas apply to living couples of any ages during their first marriage, or any higher order marriage, and to any two people of opposite sexes in cohabitation. Computer programs have been written for calculating each duration for couples of any ages in a given population when the required information is available. Numerical values of the durations of widowhood for males and females, respectively, based on the complete life tables of the 1989 United States white male and female populations, have been obtained and tabulated. They are available to interested readers on request. Relations between the durations of separation, widowhood and the duration of marriage and the expectation of life are also developed.