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The article presents a paper that attempts to summarize briefly and appraise the available information on educational achievement and family stability, with particular attention to divorce, and in addition offers some new findings drawn from a study of 4,648 divorces recorded in Atlanta and Macon, Georgia. The idea of family stability fundamentally refers to the unity of the family as a going concern. Although population census data have been widely used to show a relationship between family stability and education, very few researchers and textbook writers have inquired into the serious limitations and deficiencies of census data in this regard. The events themselves--namely divorce and desertion--have not been studied directly from official registrations. In line with the pattern of birth and death registration, the practice is not to ask for educational background in marriage and divorce registration in the United States. Academicians and other professional persons favor getting such information, but the state and local registrars are opposed to the idea because of anticipated resistance and resentment from the parties concerned.

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The article presents a study on the correlation of penalties for adultery by married women with divorce for childlessness. Among the societal devices that could mitigate the effects of childlessness include polygyny, adoption and trial marriage. The authors chose penalties for adultery rather than frequency of adultery as a means of coping with childlessness because they believe that many factors besides childlessness could affect the frequency of adultery, and that childlessness may be relatively unimportant compared to those other factors. The study found that societies that do not allow divorce for childlessness have less severe penalties for adultery. The study also found that adultery frequency and divorce for childlessness are not significantly related.

The article presents information on effects of a major social upheaval, the World War, upon a social institution, marriage. It will be demonstrated that the abnormally large number of marriages contracted immediately following the World War led subsequently to a greater number of divorces than might be expected from comparison with the divorce rates for other years. The Federal Government has taken an annual census of marriage and divorce since 1922. Before 1922 marriage and divorce statistics were collected for the single year, 1916, and for the period from 1867 to 1906. In glancing over the marriage and divorce census for 1930 the writer noted a very interesting phenomenon in Table 22 of that publication. Table 22 gives the divorces classified according to the number of years married. For example, in 1922 there was a total of 141,110 divorces granted. Of these, 6,445 involved couples who had been married for less than one year, 12,126 involved couples who had been married for one year up to two years, 14,220 involved couples married from two years up to three years and so on. In the second part of this table the percentage distribution of divorces for the various years' duration of marriage is recorded.

The article presents information on a study of divorce in Poland. The author's intention was not to analyses the meaning of the legal rules, but to find out how they work. The explanation of these purposes and the empirical investigation of their fulfillment constitute the main contents of the study. The effects of the divorce rules seem to be controversial in all countries which recognize divorce. This is particularly true in the East-European countries among them Poland. All these countries accept the breakdown of marriage as an embracing ground for divorce. In Poland there are two main limitations to this limit. The first concerns children, the court cannot decree divorce if it is contrary to their welfare. The second is the recrimination rule, the guilty spouse cannot, in principle claim divorce, unless his or her innocent partner agrees to divorce. With these two exceptions, the complete and permanent breakdown of marriage is sufficient and simultaneously, the only ground for divorce. However, it is always the duty of the divorce court to act against divorce, to try to reconcile the parties, not only at a special conciliatory session at the beginning of each trial, but also later.

Until quite recently, much of the research on early marriage has been stimulated by, if not subordinate to, social attitudes and values opposing such marriage. This opposition is explicit in the policies of most school administrators and in the anecdotal accounts of popular literature about the hazards and tragedies of early marriage. It is at least implicit in professional journals and marriage textbooks which generalize about the negative causes and unfavorable results of early marriage, describe the negative characteristics of persons who marry very young, and cite the association between early age at marriage and divorce. The earlier subordination of research on early marriage to social attitudes opposing such marriage has fostered some interesting gaps in research. For example, although there is some evidence that childbearing involves a greater biological risk for both the child and the mother when the latter is 16 than when she is 24, there are minimum data available concerning the age of parents as an independent variable in child rearing.

A one-parameter exhaustible Poisson process mode! is formulated to represent the cumulative divorce trajectory of marriage cohorts. On the basis of recently published data of nine-year cumulative records of all one-year United States marriage cohorts, 1949-1958, it is found that the one-parameter model does not provide an empirically adequate representation of cohort divorce trajectories. Therefore, two modifications of the basic model are explored. First, it is assumed that the longer the couples remain married the smaller is the probability of their becoming divorced (a cumulative inertia modification), Second, it is assumed that the cohort can be divided into two groups one of which is subject to risk of divorce while the other is not (a mover-stayer modification). It is concluded that the latter model provides a better approximation to the empirically observed divorce trajectories, Given availability of disaggregated observations of divorces for marriage cohorts, the model could be used as a mathematical language for the construction of a theory of divorce differentials and changes in the divorce condition over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses some aspects of marriage breakdown in Great Britain during the last thirty years. A randomly selected British sample of some 3,000 men and women both ever-married and still single aged between 16 and 59 years were interviewed. Men were questioned by male, women by female, interviewers. Only a husband or a wife in one marriage partnership was selected for interview, never both. The informants, amounting to 82 per cent of all those selected for interview, were reasonably representative of the British population in respect of sex, age and marital status. This article is concerned chiefly with the 2,338 ever-married informants, but it does take into account the opinions of the 95 currently engaged and of the 622 entirely single in its analysis of attitudes to divorce. It concentrates on three topics, namely, pre-marital attitudes to divorce, the extent of marriage breakdown of various kinds, and some background factors associated with marital difficulties. Certain couples appear more likely to experience marital difficulty than others. It is well known, for example, that the marriages of young couples are twice as likely to end in divorce as marriages in which the brides are older. The likelihood of marital breakdown may vary with other factors too, and the survey has provided an opportunity to look at some of these.

It is informed that in view of the widespread post-war interest in problems of marriage breakdown, it is surprising that so little is known of the demographic and sociological aspects of divorce in England and Wales. Since there had appeared for some time to be a need for mote information, the members of the Population Investigation Committee decided to initiate a statistical inquiry into marriage and marital breakdown. This study, now in progress, includes an analysis of the published statistics on divorce and also an examination of statistical material extracted from samples of divorce petitions filed in the two census years, 1871 and 1951. Before the middle of the nineteenth century divorce was an extremely expensive and complicated judicial, ecclesiastical and legislative process. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which first made civil divorce available, was not a great legal innovation, its main purpose being merely to simplify, and incidentally to cheapen, procedure so that it might become accessible at need to the rising middle classes. Under the Act a petitioner, who previously had to go first to a civil court, next to the ecclesiastical court and finally to Parliament for a private Act, was able to sue at all stages of divorce in one specially established section of the High Court. The grounds on which the new court could grant decrees were exactly the same as under the former ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

The article analyzes a hypothetical stationary population by family units. The term family unit is throughout used to denote either a married couple, a widow, a widower (together with, any unmarried children under 25) or an unmarried person over age 25. The rates of mortality assumed have been based on the experience of Great Britain in the years 1942-4, adjusted to eliminate deaths attributable to war causes. A model population constructed on this mortality basis requires an annual crop of 1537 births in order to maintain a constant total of 100,000 persons. The probable future level of marriage rates in Great Britain has been based on that experienced in England and Wales in 1938, these rates being broadly equivalent to the experience in the five years 1945-9, if allowance is made for the additional remarriages resulting from the high level of post-war divorces. The future level of divorce rates, though probably higher than in 1938, is very speculative. Whatever the assumptions made, the importation of divorce (and subsequent remarriage) rates into the calculations would complicate them considerably.