PARENTAL MARITAL TRANSITIONS AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

This proposal is intended to meet Research Objective number 13 (Social Psychology of Aging). The Principal Investigator is a new investigator. Divorce and remarriage have become a normative part of the American life course during this century. While significant attention has been given to the consequences of the divorce revolution to the early stages of life (e.g. children, young adults), comparatively little is still known about its importance in later life. The purpose of this research is to provide a comprehensive assessment of the consequences of parental martial transitions for intergenerational family relationships of middle- aged parents and their adult children. The proposed study has two objectives, First drawing on a life course theoretical perspective, we intend to focus explicit attention of the effects of exposure, duration, and timing of parents' marital transitions for exchanges of intergenerational assistance between these aging parents and their adult children. We also plan to test several potential mechanisms for the observed differences. Second, we plan to address the question of whether parent's past marital history moderates children's responses to parental needs. We intend to explicitly examine how adult children's exposure to their parents' marital histories moderates the amounts and kinds of help they give parents who have experienced a crisis in the five year interval between the two waves of data collection. Cross-cutting these objectives are an explicit focus on racial variations, gender differences, and the role of a biological tie between parent and child. The data for this project will be drawn from the 1988 and 1992 waves of the National Survey of Families and Households, We plan to estimate a hierarchial set of nested logistic (for dichotomous outcomes), poisson (for count data), and linear regression (for continuous outcomes) models designed to evaluate, in turn, the role of particular features of martial histories. Additional models will explore possible mechanisms as increased geographical dispersion, changes in needs and resources, and relationship quality, the role of changes in parent's needs, and a series of interaction terms that measure the potential moderating effects of marital history on the responsiveness of children to changes in parental need.