Regional Differences in Divorce in the United States

The authors examine regional variations in the US rate with the concept of social integration as an explanation for these variations. Social integration includes residential mobility community siex religious preference frequency of attendance of religious services and age at marriatge. The most striking aspect of the findings is the large regional variation in all of the indicators of marital dissolution; the divorce belt (the West South Central Mountain and Pacific census divisions) has rates about 50% higher than those of the rest of the country. Adjusting for differences in racial marital religious and socioeconomic composition reduced regional variations only a little. A negative indicator of social integration called the Residential Mobility Index is related to a measure of marital dissolution from which the effects of years of exposure to the risk of religious background socioeconomic background and several community and family background variables have been removed. The relationship among the 9 regions is very strong (r=.978) and is also very strong when the measure of marital dissolution is computed only for persons living in the same state they lived in at age 16 (r=.942). The extremely high level of marital dissolution in the American divorce belt can be accounted for by a high level of residential movement there; intervening variables are probably a symptom of variables associated with level of social integration. (authors modified)