rev iews 511

without losing that hard won though much criticised professional specialist knowledge and
skill.
kate wilson
University of Nottingham

Wolfinger, N. W. (2005) Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their
Own Marriages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 180, £14.99, pbk.
doi:10.1017/S0047279407291020

Many readers will undoubtedly be groaning as yet another divorce book trundles off the presses.
This one is about the long term effects of parental divorce on adult children’s own marriages.
More doom and gloom? Well, not exactly. The message from the research reported here is a
mixed one. On the one hand, the author tells us that there exists a wealth of evidence that
apparently suggests that ‘divorce begets divorce,’ (although the ‘reasons’ for this are far from
clear) and this is supported by the author’s own research discussed in this book. This, to the
more conservatively minded, and those who fear that the proliferation of no-fault philosophies
is the dangerous start to the slippery slope of family and social disintegration, is likely to provoke
a satisfied I-told-you-so response. But, on the other hand, a closer reading reveals a rather more
complicated picture.
It may be true that growing up in a divorced family means, statistically speaking at least,
that you are more likely to end up divorced yourself. But this book also reminds us of other
factors at work. For example, children of divorce are more likely to marry other children
of divorce, and they’re also the ones who are more likely to avoid marriage altogether. The
author also points out that he increasingly finds a growing number of adult children of divorce
who are creating enduring, successful unions for themselves. Interestingly, too, having parents
who divorced appears to have no effect at all on the stability (or otherwise) of cohabitation
partnerships.
The author makes a case – though given the nature of the data (two large scale US datasets,
collected 1987 to 1994, and 1973 to 1994, and analysed statistically) it must remain a provisional,
tentative one – that the central reason why the cycle of divorce is strong, is that children
of divorce have ongoing difficulties in the kinds of interpersonal skills that are necessary to
maintain committed relationships. But before you say ‘stuff and nonsense’, and slam the book
shut, the author goes on to reveal that, since the early 1970s, as divorce has become more
common – now estimated to affect one in two marriages in the US – it no longer hurts children
as much as it once did. Thus the ‘inter-generational transmission of divorce’ that is the subject
of this book is eventually revealed to be a phenomenon that is fast being crushed under the
footsteps of the onward march of history.
This book suffers from all the usual limitations that routinely affect studies that rely on
the statistical analysis of large scale datasets. We have, for example, no sense of the personal
experiences of the people involved, let alone the meanings of those experiences. Without
such insights into real lives, thoughts and feelings, our understanding of what happens
between one generation and the next, or within individual biographies, must necessarily
be incomplete. The significance of changing social and cultural conditions provides an
ongoing backdrop to demographic patterns, and again this is not discernible from this
research data. Still, the message that as divorce became more common, the intergenerational
transmission weakens, must be a heartening one, whatever the myriad complexities that lie
behind it.
512 rev iews

Paradoxically, in the end, it seems to me that the research reported in this book actually
could be used to build a powerful argument in favour of making divorce easier. I wonder
whether its author would agree?
shelley day-sclater
University of East London

Pantazis, C., Gordon, D. and Levitas, R. (Eds.) (2006) Poverty and Social Exclusion in
Britain: The Millennium Survey. Bristol: The Policy Press. pp. 488, £24.99, pbk.
doi:10.1017/S0047279407301025

This book is a compendium of analyses based on the Poverty and Social Exclusion ‘Millennium’
survey funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It has clearly been a massive undertaking
for the authors and editors involved. The survey examines a vast range of variables to do with
income and standards of living, as well as attitudes towards poverty, and how these relate to
typical socio-demographic measures for individuals. Important relationships are highlighted
and explored between poverty and service use, crime, mental health, employment, gender and
age.
However, the name of the survey is a clue to a big problem with the work – when this review
is published, the data will be eight years out of date. There is always, naturally, a lag between
the stages of funding and publishing research but this is exceptional. This has repercussions for
the policy and practice implications. The political environment now is quite different to that
of the early years of New Labour – spending is tighter, the public are more disenchanted and
the administration seems to be finding it hard to shake off persistent difficulties. It is hard to
take seriously the claims in the book that this survey charts the position now for the people of
Britain – and the authors sometimes protest its contemporaneousness a little too much, showing
that they are well aware of this flaw.
Nonetheless, it could be argued that several indicators of inequality, poverty and social
exclusion in Britain have not shown huge movements this century and in certain areas, the
analyses do remain relevant. The chapter by McKay & Collard on the links between debt,
financial inclusion and poverty in particular stands out as contributing key new evidence. This
is perhaps partly due to the paucity of research elsewhere on the relationship between levels of
debt and income or standards of living.
The survey clearly had a big influence on how child poverty is being additionally measured,
i.e. through combinations of income and an index of material deprivation. The stress put in the
report on ensuring that poverty is thought about as a dynamic concept is valued and absolutely
essential.
Indeed, a long and well-referenced case is made for this being a ‘proper’ and, crucially,
scientific assessment of poverty levels, with the framework of a leading philosopher of science,
Imre Lakatos, cited in support. However, this is a partial reading of the history of the discipline,
which has been ridden with controversy since the logical positivists were first undermined. It is
not true to infer that all scientists accept the description of science that Lakatos proposes (even
if they did, this would not make it ‘true’!). Furthermore, the fact that the ‘paradigm’ of research
on poverty presented in the book appears to fit with Lakatos’ model does not ‘prove’ that it is
‘scientific’! There are other, valid philosophies of science that still compete with Lakatos, such
as those of Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend. Lakatos did not simply add on two further axioms
to falsificationism, as implied in the book, and he was much more critical of Popper than that.
Indeed, many of the philosophies of science, including that of Lakatos, are (ironically, given the
general contempt shown by these thinkers towards the social sciences) much more about the