The role of personality traits in the risk of marriage dissolution. Are personality traits adding to our understanding of the sociological and demographic antecedents of marriage dissolution?

Dimitri Mortelmans, Universiteit Antwerpen
Koen Ponnet, Universiteit Antwerpen
Laurence Claes, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Inge Pasteels, Universiteit Antwerpen

The field of divorce studies focuses to a great extent on three domains: causes, progress and consequences of divorce. Several disciplines have studied the phenomenon of relationship dissolution, from a variety of angles. Although the demographic and the psychological studies have several communalities, insights from both fields are seldom integrated in studies on predictors of divorce. First, this paper integrates both perspectives by looking at divorce risks from social and psychological factors on the individual and the couple level. Stated differently, we estimate the predictive power of personality, taking into account individual and couple characteristics (e.g. age at marriage, parental divorce, education …). Second, we interact the personality traits with the demographic factors, focusing on the cohort effect and the duration effect of personality on divorce