Socio-economic models of divorces in different societies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how social, economic, and legal factors influence divorce rates across countries using a phase transition model and analyzes data from the UN, highlighting the complex interplay of these variables.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative model incorporating social and economic factors to explain divorce dynamics and tests its applicability across different societies.

Findings

Pure sociological and economic models often fail to predict divorce rates accurately.

Legal and economic factors can have a significant impact on divorce rates in specific countries.

The phase transition model provides insights into the coupling and separation of couples based on societal variables.

Abstract

Population dynamic of getting divorced depends on many global factors, including social norms, economy, law or demographics as well as individual factors like the level of interpersonal or problem-solving skills of the spouses. We sought to find such a relationship incorporating only quantitative variables and test theoretical model considering phase transition between coupling (pairs) and free (single) preferential states as a function of social and economic. The analyzed data has been collected by UN across almost all the countries since 1948. Our first approach is followed by Bouchaud's model of social network of opinions, which works well with dynamics of fertility rates in postwar Europe. Unfortunately, we postulate that this pure sociological and pure economic approach fail in general. Thus, we did some observation about why it went wrong and where economy (e. g. Poland) or law (e. g. Portugal) has bigger impact on getting divorce than social pressure.