Partners' age difference and marital dissolution in Italy

Among the factors related to marital disruption, age assortative mating (who marries whom in terms of age) has received less attention than others. In this study, we study the association between partners' age difference and marital disruption in Italy, a late-comer country in divorce legislati...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Corti, Giulia|||0000-0002-2287-2307, Bellani, Daniela|||0000-0003-0672-925X, Guarneri, Antonella, Rinesi, Francesca
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:305974
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/305974
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.12765/CPoS-2024-14
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Age assortative mating
Marital disruption
Italy
Age hypogamy
Descripción
Sumario:Among the factors related to marital disruption, age assortative mating (who marries whom in terms of age) has received less attention than others. In this study, we study the association between partners' age difference and marital disruption in Italy, a late-comer country in divorce legislation and highly conservative in its culture and institutions. We also show how this association varies across marriage cohorts. We employ data from "Families, social subjects and life cycle" (FSS), collected in 2016 by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). We analyse micro-level retrospective information on first-marriage histories between the 1970s and the 1990s through an event-history approach. Results show that age hypogamous couples (where the woman is older than the man) have a higher likelihood of marital disruption compared to couples where the wife is the same age or younger than her husband. However, this higher risk reduces among the youngest cohorts. We discuss the possible drivers of this change in light of cultural changes that occurred in recent decades.