van Damme, Maike2024-06-062024-06-062020van Damme M. The negative female educational gradient of union dissolution: towards an explanation in six European countries. In: Mortelmans D, editor. Divorce in Europe: new insights in trends, causes and consequences of relation break-ups. Cham: Springer; c2020. p. 93-122. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-25838-2_5978-3-030-25837-5978-3-030-25840-5http://hdl.handle.net/10230/60378How can we explain that, nowadays, lower educated women are more likely to separate than higher educated women are? I formulate hypotheses to explain this based on Levinger’s (J Marriage Family 27(1):19–28, 1965; J Soc Issues 32(1):21–47, 1976; Handbook of interpersonal commitment and relationship stability. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 1999) social exchange theory on ‘attractions’ and ‘barriers’ and assess whether there are mediating effects of affectional rewards, economic rewards, symbolic rewards, affectional barriers, material barriers, and symbolic costs. I analyse the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) [2004–2013] for two waves for Bulgaria, Russia, Georgia, France, Austria, and Czech Republic. With this selection of countries, I have a good context variation according to social and economic costs of union dissolution. Using the khb-approach – which is a mediation analysis for binary dependent variables – I examine the probability that women broke up between two consecutive waves and explain the influence of education on union dissolution. Instead of being mainly explained by ‘attractions’, ‘barriers’ were more important explanatory variables of the negative educational gradient of union dissolution in the six countries I studied (lower educated women had less to lose symbolically and economically). Next to relationship satisfaction as the only explanatory ‘attraction’, I found suppressor effects of ‘attractions’.application/pdfeng© 2020 The Author(s). This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter¿s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter¿s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart2024-06-06http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25838-2_5ConfoundingEducationKhb-methodMediation analysisUnion dissolutioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess