Marital disruption in the Czech Republic: the role of personal characteristics, individuality, and premarital cohabitation

In this paper, we apply event history analysis to examine the possible determinants of marital disruption in the Czech Republic. We use the method of hazard regression with the baseline captured by multiple duration clocks; the event under observation is the first marital union disruption. We use the Fertility and Family Survey data from 1997, which covers the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. We focus on personal characteristics, the attributes of individuality and on conditions of partnership formation. We are particularly interested in characteristics covering the development of respondent’s individuality in early life stages, like being an only child, experiencing the parents’ divorce, living alone after leaving parental home and cohabiting before marriage. We control among others for the effect of educational enrolment and attainment and for the effect of children on marital stability. Through introducing unobserved heterogeneity into model, we also control for unobserved personal characteristics and examine the role of selection in the marital dissolution process. Some of our results are similar to the results found among Western societies: Parental divorce and premarital cohabitation, as well as young age at marriage and childlessness are shifting the probability of marital breakdown towards upper levels. Moreover, we show that having no siblings and living independently in early adulthood contribute to higher marital disruption proneness of individuals.