Marital reconciliation and divorce decision making

Most people marry with the intent of staying married their entire lives. However, over half of current marriages are predicted to end in divorce. We still know very little about the process people go through when they consider getting a divorce. The impact of divorce has been well established on multiple outcomes, and most of the research suggests divorce is tough on children, women, extended kinship networks, communities, and even the environment. There are many couples that look at divorce as the only option for solving marital problems and never even consider reconciliation or whether or not they could restore their marriage to a healthier relationship. This project attempts to discover what people consider in the divorce decision making process and how couples who consider the possibility of reconciliation, are successful in avoiding an unnecessary divorce. We will attempt to interview people who are in the midst of a divorce decision making process to gain a better understanding of how they think about the process of deciding whether or not to divorce. One of the unique aspects of our research is that we'll be interviewing couples and we'll try to track them over a 10 year period (or at least set it up that we can) to see how their thinking changes over time. Our hope is that if we can understand the deciion making process better we'll be able to more effectively intervene in the lives of couples on the brink of divorce to prevent unnecessary divorce. Obviously not all divorces should be avoided, but we believe that there are many that could be avoided through the proper application of knowledge gained from this project.