Attitudes Towards Divorce, A Case Study of the Republic of Moldova

1. Attitudes Towards Divorce,A Case Study of the Republic of Moldova NehaRaval nr0449a@american.edu American University School of International Service

2. Research Question & Hypothesis • Research Question: Do attitudes towards divorce vary Depending on a person’s sex? • Ho: There is no statistically significant relationship between a person’s sex and their attitudes towards divorce. • H1: There is a statistically significant relationship between a person’s sex and their attitudes towards divorce.

3. Literature Review Abbott, Pamela and Sapsford, Roger.: Trust, Confidence, and social environment in post-communist societies. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 39 February 2006, pp. 59-71. • Through surveys, the authors measure the correlation between trust and confidence in social, political, and economic structures in Post- Soviet societies. - Look at the question of a breakdown of marriages and other aspects of society in relation to a lack of trust from the Post-Soviet era. Mocanu, Diana.: Migration and the Republic of Moldova. European Social watch Report 2009, http://www.socialwatch.eu/wcm/Moldova.html. - This article looks at the effects of migration and the Moldovan economy which is strongly driven by remittances. It analyzes the positive and negative mpact of migration on social structures (such as families, local government, and so on) in Moldova.

4. Data • Data will be collected from the World Values Survey- 11/18/2006 to 11/30/2006 conducted in the Republic of Moldova. The unit of analysis will be individuals in Moldova. The World Values Survey is a prestigious and reliable source and the sample is large. • Dependent Variable: d..attitude… Is divorce believed to be justifiable or not justifiable in Moldova? Independent Variables: X051 is Ethnic Group, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Moldovan, Russian, Ukrainian, Other X047 is Scale of Incomes, Low, Mid, High X001 is Sex, male or female X025r is Education Level, Lower, Middle, Upper X007 is Marital Status, Married, living together as married, divorced, separated, widowed, single/never married

5. Descriptive Statistics * All missing data was recorded into ‘missing’ values.

6. *All of the ethnic groups shown believed that divorce was not justifiable, expect for the Gagauz (not pictured) which believe that divorce is justifiable stastically more than not justifiable.

7. Bivariate Analysis Chi square shows that there is a statistically significant relationship between Ethnic group, education level, and marital status and our dependent variable, attitudes towards divorce. Although chi square suggests there is also a statistically significant relaitionship between size of town and attitudes towards divorce, Lambda is low giving us ambiguous results suggesting that size of town is not significant.

8. Probit Analysis

9. Policy Implications • From the data, we can fail to reject the null hypothesis. My hypothesis was that there would be a statistically significant relationship between sex and attitudes towards divorce, however this was not demonstrated. However, although there was no statistically significant relationship between many of the independent variables and the dependent variable, there was between three (ethnic group, education level, and marital status) and so we must both accept and reject the null hypothesis. • In terms of policy options, there is not a direct correlation between attitudes towards divorce and policy suggestions in the Commonwealth of Independent States, however it is important to think about social structures when looking at policies about migration. Do more open migration policies keep parents away from their children for longer and keep spouses away from each other for longer periods? Does that add to an acceptance of divorce, that is ultimately inevitable, or widely accepted?