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What Are They Thinking? A National-Sample Study Of Stability And Change In Divorce Ideation, Alan J. Hawkins, Adam M. Galovan, Steven M. Harris, Sage E. Allen, Kelly M. Roberts, David G. Schramm

Human Development and Family Studies Faculty Publications

This study reports on a nationally representative sample of married individuals ages 25–50 (N = 3,000) surveyed twice (1 year apart) to investigate the phenomenon of divorce ideation, or what people are thinking when they are thinking about divorce. Twenty-eight percent of respondents had thought their marriage was in serious trouble in the past but not recently. Another 25% had thoughts about divorce in the last 6 months. Latent Class Analyses revealed three distinct groups among those thinking about divorce at Time 1: soft thinkers (49%), long-term-serious thinkers (45%), and conflicted thinkers (6%). Yet divorce ideation was not static; …