Japanese Sociological Review

This study investigates the differences in divorce risk by educational assortative mating and its changes across cohorts. It particularly focuses on women’s educational hypogamy and educational homogamy of highly educated couples, both of which have increased due to women’s improved access to higher education. Previous studies have argued that educational hypogamy couples are more likely to experience divorce than other types of couples because of its atypical character. However, in the United States, where gender equality has been improving over the decades, the positive association between educational hypogamy and divorce has declined. This study also elucidates whether typical and atypical nature of spouse pairing pattern, which accompanies a gender asymmetric relationship, has changed in Japan, by examining the relationship between educational assortative mating and divorce. In addition, as the Second Demographic Transition theory predicted, educational differences in divorce are expected to decline as the tolerance of divorce increases. However, recent studies have argued that family formation is increasingly stable among highly educated couples, compared to their less educated peers. Based on this literature, this study examines the association between educational assortative mating and divorce using an event history analysis of two nationally representative survey data: NFRJ-S01 and SSM2015. Results revealed that educational hypogamy couples are more likely to experience divorce before 1980s cohorts, but the association has disappeared in recent cohorts. By contrast, no association was observed between educational homogamy of highly educated and less educated couples.

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Decades of family studies in the United States have revealed low educational andsocioeconomic attainment and the reproduction of poverty and inequality among the children and adolescents of divorced parents, as well as the existence of intergenerational transmission of divorce. However, there has been little research into these phenomena in Japan, especially the intergenerational transmission of divorce. In recent years, the divorce rate has increased; moreover, the poverty rates experienced by divorced single-mother households in Japan cannot be sufficiently reduced by the social welfare system alone. If the intergenerational transmission of divorce exists in Japan, households with children in which the parents divorce will mostly become single-mother households, and this will also be true for the second generation（the children of divorce）; this intergenerational transmission of divorce can be associated with the reproduction of poverty. This study examines the intergenerational transmission of divorce in Japan, as well as mediating factors such as lower educational attainment and early marriage, which have been identified as factors of intergenerational transmission of divorce in former studies.
Using data from the Japanese Life Course Panel Surveys（JLPS）for the Youth（JLPS-Y）and the Middle-Aged（JLPS-M）, the analyses revealed that experiencing parental divorce had a significant positive association with divorce among the offspring, confirming that intergenerational transmission of divorce among both men and women exists in Japan. This transmission effect was partially mediated by lower educational attainment and the early marriage of the offspring. The existence of intergenerational transmission of divorce suggests that families that experience divorce and become single-mother households will lead to a second generation of single-mother households, both of which could experience and reproduce poverty in subsequent generations.

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