A Comparative Analysis of Divorce Trends in the United States and China since 19801.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the divorce trends in the United States and China since 1980 and examines the consistency and disparity of alternative measures of divorce rate. While divorce rate is a special sociodemographic indicator, with different measures often yielding inconsistent or even contradictory results, this study contributes to the literature with a comparative analysis using data from the United States and China over 40 years. Results suggest that, as compared to the refined divorce rate (number of divorces per 1,000 married population) that counts only people with a possibility to divorce, the widely used crude divorce rate (number of divorces per 1,000 population) overestimated the increase in China's divorce rate from 1980 to 2019 by 60.76% and the decrease in U.S. divorce rate over the same period by 15.13%. Also, although in 1980 the U.S. divorce rates were much higher than the corresponding Chinese rates, divorce rates in these two nations, with very different socioeconomic systems and stages of economic development, are progressively getting closer in recent years. However, whether and when China's divorce rate may start to decrease, following an inverted U-shaped pattern over time observed in the United States and some other nations, remains a question for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]