THE DYNAMICS OF DECISION-MAKING IN DIVORCE : THE PERSPECTIVE OF WOMEN

Abstract

In Singapore, divorcing persons have been a population that is slowly expanding, yet its special needs are insufficiently recognised, little studied and poorly served. There is no local research which describes the immediate experience of individuals at the time of divorce or addresses changes throughout the process of divorce decision-making. The present research is an attempt to address the lacuna in the literature, with particular emphasis on the socio-cultural processes surrounding the decision to divorce, from the women's perspective. The main analytical framework applied in understanding the process of divorce decision-making was Glaser and Strauss' (1971) theory of status passage. The four dimensions of the status passage applied to this study were: shape, reversibility, circumstantiality and desirability. In the shaping of the passage, the decision-making process appears to move through three phases: the private, the public, and the litigation phase. The private phase was characterised by fleeting thoughts or fantasies of divorce. Although there was a marked escalation of conflict, the natural response at this stage was an attempt to "conceal the rift". In the public phase of decision-making, fantasy or threat became crystallised by one of the spouses into behaviour significant of divorce. This was usually signalled by a movement from managing conflict within the confines of the conjugal relationship to disc1osing the conflict to friends or family members and in extreme instances (as this study depicts) to a professional help agency. In the final phase of litigation, decision-making was complicated by four main factors: the emotional reactivity of the partners, their naivete as negotiators, the scarcity of divisible resources and the discrepancy in relative power between husbands and wives. Closely related to this dimension of shape was the critical issue of control. Hence initiators of the divorce were ahead of non-initiators in their intentionality and purposefulness in shaping the passage. With respect to reversibility, the structural condition of divorce decision-making may have a certain built-in repeatability for reversals, in terms of reconciliation in the marriage. The inevitability of status change hinged upon the perception of seriousness of the ensuing conflict, since once a certain point of tolerance had been crossed, the majority of respondents filed unilaterally for divorce. The clarity of the signals of transition, when recounted, gave the passages a sense of structure over an otherwise ill-defined passage. In the private phase, these included incidents of physical assault or communication about the divorce, while in the public phase, physical separation and extramarital liaisons featured. Circumstantiality discusses the circumstances surrounding the type of passage embarked on. Divorce decision-making is a good example of a collective passage with several solo passages embedded in it. In this study, the respondents confronted great ambiguity both in role support from their informal support network (often necessitating the solicitation of professional advice) as well as institutional support in terms of the lack of normative prescription with regards to the timing and pacing of the passage. Desirability was ascribed to the passage only when respondents made the painful shift from defining the stigmatised status of divorce as more tolerable than remaining in their marriages. Here, the extent of one's merger of the person with the former roles of wife and mother was significant in explaining the difficulty of the decision-making process. Hence, from the above dimensions, four variables were derived in this study which account for the ease or difficulty of the decision-making process: the degree of control, the perception of the seriousness of conflict, the ambiguity of role support and the extent of the role person merger.