This article uses longitudinal data to estimate the shortand medium-term economic effects of divorce in the USA, the UK, Switzerland, Korea, Germany and Australia during the first decade of the 21st century. Based on the data collected during the 2000s, in all of the countries studied, divorce had, on average, negative effects on the equivalised household incomes of women. However, the extent and duration of the negative effects of divorce differed markedly between countries. In all of the countries, the effects of divorce on the equivalised household income of men were smaller than for women. Although, using the available data, it is not possible to definitely explain the differences between countries, the analysis presented in this article has demonstrated that the average economic effects of divorce, particularly for women, are heavily influenced by the social security system, the labour market, family models and the family law system of each country. While the social security system and institutional arrangements such as child support and spousal maintenance do influence women's post-divorce economic outcomes, what is most important in explaining cross-country differences is women's labour market earnings and the extent to which re-partnering occurs.

This paper looks at how life satisfaction changes as we pass through various life transitions on the pathway from adolescence through young adulthood, middle age and into old age. It explores how leaving home, commencing a relationship, having children, separating, entering the “empty nest” phase, retirement and widowhood affect life satisfaction. Summary We all experience ups and downs at various points throughout life. This paper explores whether we experience predictable changes in life satisfaction over the life course—both as we get older and as we pass through a range of common life course transitions. The paper looks at how life satisfaction changes as we pass through various life transitions on the pathway from adolescence through young adulthood, middle age and into old age. It explores how leaving home, commencing a relationship, having children, separating, entering the “empty nest” phase, retirement and widowhood affect life satisfaction. We concentrate on three main questions: Do these life course transitions have an effect on life satisfaction, and if so, in what way? Is any such effect of life course transitions greater for men or for women? When a life course transition affects life satisfaction, is the change longlasting or relatively short-lived? For example, do people tend to “bounce back” within some years of experiencing transitions that erode life satisfaction, and if so, how long after the transition is this likely to become apparent? The same questions arise in relation to transitions that enhance life satisfaction. Research into subjective wellbeing suggests that most people tend to view life in a positive light and are able to adapt to various circumstances (Cummins, 2000; Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006). It is argued that, except in extreme circumstances, people have their own “normal” level of wellbeing, which increases or decreases in response to personally important changes and challenges, but eventually returns to their “normal” level. That is, the ups and downs of wellbeing will usually be transitory and are governed by some sort of homeostatic mechanism. But people do not always bounce back—especially under severe circumstances (e.g., Cummins, 2000; Diener et al., 2006; Lucas, 2007). Diener et al. argued that individuals may have multiple “set points”, such that after experiencing adversity a person may bounce back, but not all the way, and thus they establish a new (but lower) baseline of life satisfaction. Cummins also maintained that extremes in adversity can defeat the homeostatic process.

Living alone is increasingly on the public radar. One in four Australian households is a loneperson household, and rates have increased sharply since the 1970s. Throughout the Western world lone-person households have become increasingly common, and this trend is spreading to non-Western countries. In some quarters these developments have been interpreted as signifying a decline of commitment to family living, increasing social fragmentation and a rise in loneliness. For others, the growth in living alone has been celebrated as reflecting the greater choice that people have in their living arrangements and lifestyle.

Divorce has become a key life-course risk that can have significant economic impacts. This article uses a new Australian data source that follows families over a 10-year period to estimate the impact of divorce on income and assets. There have been few longitudinal studies of the impact of divorce on assets and relatively few such studies of its impact on income. The article finds that divorce has a substantial negative impact upon the household income of women in the short term, but by 6 years after divorce income had largely recovered to what it would have been had they remained married. In contrast, men who divorce experience a substantially faster rate of increase in income post-divorce than had they remain married. The analysis of asset data reveals that while the gap between the value of assets of the divorced and non-divorced grows post-divorce, it appears that the growing disparity in assets largely reflects pre-divorce differences in assets. The results in this article clearly demonstrate the critical importance of using longitudinal data to estimate the economic and labour market consequences of divorce. While the economic effects of divorce on Australian women appear to be, on average, relatively short-run, the Australian social security system plays a crucial role in protecting the incomes of women post-divorce, particularly those with children.

ABSTRACTIn virtually all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries the number of older people who have experienced divorce at some point in their lives will increase in coming decades. While there is an extensive literature that analyses the effects of divorce on wellbeing, there is relatively little research on the long-run effects of divorce in later life. This paper uses Australian data to estimate the long-run impacts of divorce on the wellbeing of older Australians. Dimensions of wellbeing examined are social interaction and connectedness, perceived social support, life satisfaction, and physical and mental health. The paper shows that divorce has a long-lasting, negative impact on wellbeing that persists into later life for both men and women. However, the negative effects of divorce on wellbeing are largely confined to those who do not re-partner. An important difference between men and women is that for women who are divorced and remain single, the negative effects of divorce are found for general health, vitality and mental health. Furthermore, these effects are reasonably large. For older men, there appear to be no long-term effects of divorce on physical or mental health. While there appears to be some effect of divorce on perceived social support for both older men and women, the effects of divorce on social support are less pervasive in later life than the effects of divorce on satisfaction with life and, for women, health.

Statistics on one-person households in Australia are primarily based on cross-sectional data, in particular census data. While analyses based on points in time are important in detecting trends in living alone rate and factors and circumstances associated with living alone, this approach is likely to understate the extent to which people may experience living alone at some stage in their life. More importantly, analysis based on cross-sectional data is not able to capture the processes that lead a person to live alone or give up solo living. Despite the rise in one-person households in Australia, there has been little research on the dynamics of forming and ending solo living. Drawing on the data of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (Wave 1 to Wave 4), this article explores change of one-person households and the processes that may lead to form and end one-person households.

The final paper, by David de Vaus, Matthew Gray, Lixia Qu and David Stanton, focuses on the impact of relationship breakdown on income and social exclusion in Australia. Although there is an extensive literature that uses longitudinal data to quantify the impact of divorce on income, relatively few studies use a longitudinal framework to consider its impact on other measures of financial well-being or social exclusion. This paper contributes to redressing this imbalance by extending analysis to include the effect of divorce on equivalent household income, the experience of financial hardships and self-assessed prosperity. It also examines the relationship between change in income following divorce and changes in broader measures of financial well-being. The paper finds that in Australia divorce has a substantial negative impact on the equivalent household incomes of women. While women's income recovers to the pre-divorce level over time, the income of divorced women nevertheless deteriorates when compared with the income growth of non-divorced women. For men, divorce has little impact on equivalent household income. Divorce also increases the likelihood of women experiencing hardship though the impact declines over time. The proportion of men experiencing a hardship increases only slightly following divorce and then declines to be substantially lower than it was pre-divorce. The impact of divorce on self-assessed prosperity is complex. For women, the proportion assessing themselves as being poor or very poor increases initially following divorce and then declines over time following divorce. For men, there is no evidence of an increase in the proportion identifying themselves as poor or very poor following divorce. © 2010 Intersentia

A great deal of research attention has been directed to understanding why marriages last or end in separation. Far less attention has been extended to cohabiting relationships, where couples live together without being registered as married. As in other developed countries, couple formation patterns in Australia have changed dramatically over the last few decades, with most “living-together” unions now beginning with cohabitation rather than marriage, and with an increasing proportion of babies now being born to cohabiting couples. This paper uses longitudinal data to track what happens to cohabiting relationships: whether the partners subsequently marry each other, separate or continue to cohabit over a two-year period. It then investigates the role of each partner’s relationship satisfaction and fertility aspirations in influencing the pathway taken.

For most parents, life is no longer a matter of being a parent or a worker--it's both. The traditional gender-based family model was based on role specialisation whereby mothers focussed on family work while fathers were responsible for generating the income to support the family. While mothers were excused from earning an income, fathers were largely excused from day-to-day family caring obligations. But the emergence of the democratic family means that roles are not meant to be ascribed simply because of gender but are to be negotiated and shared. At the level of ideology at least, mothers are encouraged to participate in the public world of paid work and fathers are to participate more in the private world of family caring. While this new deal of gender equality is widely accepted in theory we have not been so successful in working out how to live the new deal. Both mothers and fathers have largely been expected to add responsibilities and work to their already crowded lives. Numerous studies have demonstrated that simply doing two full-time jobs (parenting and waged work) is extraordinarily difficult for any individual and results in considerable stress and can result in degraded parenting and degraded relationships. The demands for an individual in doing both roles has been shown to be particularly demanding on mothers who, despite taking on paid work, continue to do the lion's share of the domestic work. The experience of the competing demands of family and of employment is not uniform. Many factors shape the experience. The workplace itself, the structure of the immediate family (partnered, number of children, age of children), the availability of supports from one's wider family and friends, the availability of childcare and many other considerations all contribute to the experience of tensions between work and family and the capacity to manage these tensions. The paper by Losoncz and Bortolotto (2009) provides a way of summarising the different types of experiences of mothers. Using nationally representative data they identify six broad ways in which mothers experience the need to manage both work and family lives. They describe the range of types including those who manage both roles well through to those who struggle rather unsuccessfully. Their research draws attention to both the variety of experiences and some of the factors tied to these experiences. As such it provides the basis for further thinking about how those who struggle with the balancing act might be helped to manage better. Men and women have experimented with many ways both to parent and hold down a paid job. Many of these approaches involve mothers and fathers sharing the domestic load more evenly. The theory sounds great. As mothers generate an increasing share of the responsibility for earning the family income so fathers are to play a larger role in domestic work and family care. But ample research has demonstrated that mothers who hold down even full-time jobs continue to be responsible for the larger part of these family responsibilities. Many governments have or are considering ways to encourage fathers to play a larger part in domestic and family caring responsibilities. Increasingly fathers of newborn children have access to either paid or unpaid leave as a means of both supporting the mother but to get fathers involved in daily family activities from the time their child is born. Sweden is frequently looked to as being at the leading edge of policies and practices to promote gender equality and sharing in parenting roles by both parents. Thomas and Hildingsson's (2009) paper on the domestic division of labour between parents of newborn children provides insight into the situation in a country that is at the leading edge of policies to promote greater gender equality. It is sobering to learn that despite enlightened paternity leave policies that considerable evidence of gender inequity in relation to domestic work and childcare persists despite enlightened policies. …

We investigate change in the association between premarital cohabitation and the risk of separation. Using retrospective marriage history data from the first wave (2001) of the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australian survey, we examine 6,210 first marriages formed between 1945 and 2000. We find the association between premarital cohabitation and separation is changing. The increased risk of separation for cohabitors compared to noncohabitors diminishes each year for marriages before 1988. This association then reverses for marriages after 1988, where noncohabitors have an increased risk of separation. Our results indicate that, for more recent marriages, premarital cohabitation reduces the risk of separation; more research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms for this reversal.

The capacity to measure change is essential in examining successful adaptation to ageing. Few studies measuring change have compared findings using pre—post approaches (employing difference scores) with those from retrospective approaches (employing self-ratings). Where this has occurred, differences have been attributed either to ceiling and floor effects or to the operation of social comparison (Choi, 2002, 2003). Our study compared pre—post and retrospective measures of change in health, health behaviors, and wellbeing over periods of 1 and 3 years among retirees. Retrospective measures were found to be more positive than pre—post measures. This discrepancy was associated with floor and ceiling effects and with a robust self-image, but not with recency, social comparison, or social desirability response sets. Pre—post difference scores have limitations as indicators of change, particularly where ceiling effects operate. A retrospective perception of improvement, combined with deterioration in scores, may result from successful psychological adaptation as people grow older.

Twenty Australian lesbian-parented families were interviewed in multigenerational family groups about the interface between their public and private worlds. Experiences of the health care bureaucracy were difficult, whereas many participants found individual providers to be approachable and caring. Three strategies were used for disclosure of their sexual orientation to health care providers: private, proud, and passive. Influences on the strategy used included family formation, role of the non-birth parent, geographic location, and expected continuity of care. Parents displayed a high degree of thoughtful planning in utilizing their preferred disclosure strategy in order to optimize safety, particularly for their children.