A decomposition of immigrant divorce rates in Australia - Research Note

Standardized divorce rates by birthplace

Indirectly standardized divorce rates per 1000 married men or women by birthplace were obtained from the product of the standardized divorce ratio and the divorce rate of married people in the reference population, which was 12.9 per 1000 married men or women (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1997). Figure 2 shows the indirectly standardized divorce rates by birthplace ranked by female rate. The rates vary from less than 10 per 1000 married men or women for migrants born in Sri Lanka, Greece and Italy to just under 25 per 1000 for migrants from Thailand, China and Hungary.

There are also sex differences by country of origin, with the male rate appreciably higher than the female rate for migrants from Austria, Egypt, former Yugoslavia, Turkey and Sri Lanka, and the female rate distinctly higher than the male rate for migrants from Thailand and the Philippines. These sex differences are due to the fact that not all men and women are divorcing spouses who are born in the same country A study of intermarriage between immigrants and Australian-born or other overseas-born persons shows that the rate of intermarriage is higher for some groups than others and that it can also vary by sex within each group (Penny and Khoo 1996). The intermarriage rates were much higher for women than men from Thailand and the Philippines, for example. The observed sex differences in the standardized divorce rate would suggest a higher rate of divorce for marriages between women born in Thailand or the Philippines and men not born in these countries compared with marriages where both spouses are born in Thailand or the Philippines.

The differences in immigrant divorce rates by birthplace, after standardizing for differences in age and marriage compositions, may be related to their different cultural and religious backgrounds and may be indicative of the divorce rates in their countries of origin. However, divorce rates are not available for many countries of origin of the immigrant groups included in this paper so that a systematic comparison is not possible. It is also possible that the high divorce rates of some birthplace groups are related to aspects of their migration and adjustment to a new environment. Examination of this hypothesis would require individual-level data on immigrants' migration and settlement experiences and their marriage outcomes, which are also currently not available.

Conclusion

Crude divorce rates of the immigrant population in Australia are not comparable by birthplace because the different birthplace groups have different age structures and marriage patterns. In this paper, we have suggested applying the decomposition method of conventional demographic analysis to the crude divorce rate to obtain indices of the effects of age structure, marriage patterns and the level of divorce. The index of the divorce rate of the married population is both a better indicator of the level of divorce and a more comparable measure. It is equivalent to a standard divorce ratio and can be multiplied by the divorce rate of married men and women in the reference population to obtain the age-standardized divorce rate of the married population in each birthplace group.