Changes in the family network after parental divorce

• Applicant: Dr. Vera de Bel, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502057823

The divorce rate in Europe has doubled in 50 years, leading to fundamental changes in one of the most important institutions of social life, the family. Although previous research studied the consequences of divorce for specific family relationships, it remains unexplored how parental divorce reverberates through the larger family network, i.e. impacting not only the relationships between parents and their children, but also with and between grandparents, aunts, uncles and stepfamily members. State-of-the-art methodological approaches are not sufficient to study the consequences of divorce for the larger family network because they disregard relational dependencies or study the network from one person’s perspective. The proposed research adopts a new approach considering the whole web of relationships among children, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and stepfamily members as the object of analysis, leading to a more complete and complex view of how family relationships change after divorce. The studies investigate: 1) differences in the structure of family networks and the substitution of absent ties, 2) activation of support and the compensation of resources, and 3) how perceived ambivalences change relationships. By comparing the family network among families with varying socio-economic backgrounds, resilient and vulnerable family networks can be identified, giving insight how such situations could be improved. The recently collected Lifelines Family Ties data, in which children, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and stepfamily members report about their relationships before and after parental divorce, will be analyzed. To validate and generalize the results to the larger population, parts of the network will be analyzed in the three-generational multi-actor panel data PAIRFAM. Collaborations with two family consultation offices are planned to establish a knowledge exchange in which findings of the project are discussed with family workers.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position