ArticleSociological science2019
Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children's Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis.
Article in Sociological science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social connection and its prospective association with adolescent internalising and externalising symptoms: an exploratory cross-country study using retrospective harmonisation.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Caring for Children in Lower-ses Contexts: Recognizing Parents' Agency, Adaptivity & Resourcefulness.Daedalus · 2025Article
- Does Ethnicity Moderate the Union Dissolution Penalty for Women? A Register-based Analysis of Changes in Income Components.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2024Article
- Parental Divorce in Childhood and the Accelerated Epigenetic Aging for Earlier and Later Cohorts: Role of Mediators of Chronic Depressive Symptoms, Education, Smoking, Obesity, and Own Marital Disruption.Journal of population ageing · 2024Article
- Disparate Effects of Disruptive Events on Children.The Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences : RSF · 2024Article
- Recent Developments in Causal Inference and Machine Learning.Annual review of sociology · 2023Article
- Entwined life events: The effect of parental incarceration timing on children's academic achievement.Advances in life course research · 2023Article
- Parental decisions to divorce and have additional children among families with children with cerebral palsy: Evidence from Swedish longitudinal and administrative data.Health economics · 2022Article
- Interlinking Structural Racism and Heteropatriarchy: Rethinking Family Structure's Effects on Child Outcomes in a Racialized, Unequal Society.Journal of family theory & review · 2022Article
- Unequal effects of disruptive events.Sociology compass · 2022Article
- Exploring Deeper Causes Linking Adolescents' Mental Disorders to Mobile Phone Use Problems: Grounded Theory Approach.JMIR formative research · 2022Article
- When less conditioning provides better estimates: overcontrol and endogenous selection biases in research on intergenerational mobility.Quality & quantity · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children's skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children's education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children's psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children's cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children's psychosocial and cognitive skills.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.