This longitudinal study explored how families respond to and manage divorce and remarriage. Participants were assessed on four occasions beginning in 1979 over a period of twenty years. The focus was mainly on positive outcomes following divorce, such as building a binuclear family, quality of the custody and coparental arrangement, and remarriage.

The sample consists of 98 binuclear families, families which span two households. Ex-spouses and their new partners were interviewed three times over a five-year period commencing one year following the divorce. In the first wave of data collection, ex-spouses were interviewed about their feelings about their marriage and divorce, reasons for divorce, custody arrangements, ex-spouse communication, and relationship satisfaction. In wave two, they were interviewed about household composition and family membership, remarriage, living arrangements, custody, co-parenting relationship, current partner, former spouse's current partner, current partner's former spouse, and all the children involved in the binuclear family. At the second wave, 91 new partners of the study participants were interviewed as well. At the third wave of data collection, participants, including 85 new partners, were asked about their current partner relationship (including their current partner's former spouse and current partner's former spouse's current partner), stepchildren and stepparenting, household composition and family membership, former spouse and children, and former spouse's current partner.

During the fourth wave, which occurred twenty years after the parents' divorce, the children were interviewed about changes in their family structure, their own marriage and relationships, their parents' transition to divorce, family relationships, and their current feelings about divorce.

Participants were randomly selected from the public divorce court records in a Midwestern county. The sample included 28 families with joint custody, 54 families with mother custody, and 16 families with father custody.

The Murray Archive holds additional analogue materials for this study: original record paper data and numeric data files from all four waves of data collection, and electronic text files and audiotape interviews from wave four. If you would like to access these materials, please apply to use the data.

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