ABSTRACT
The work we report here arises from a project that examines how residential change is linked to family or life-course events. In particular, the project focuses on two life events: residential change associated with the breakdown of relationships and movement associated with the care needs of elderly relatives. The present chapter concentrates on the first of these and uses data from the British 1 per cent Household Sample of Anonymized Records (SAR) to look at differences in the movement and living arrangements of men and women who were coded as divorced in the 1991 Census. Early on in the project we undertook a basic analysis of SAR data to compare the movement patterns of married and divorced people (Hayes, AlHamad and Geddes 1995). The paper found significant differences between the two groups, including gender differences. However, we were aware that more subtle differences probably existed within the gender groups. In particular, our analysis did not look at the households in which our divorced sample were living: how many of them lived alone, how many were living with a partner or with children-in short, the circumstances that cut across and help to make sense of aggregate movement patterns. This chapter addresses these issues, looking in greater detail at the characteristics and circumstances of the SAR divorced mover sample.
