Social support in the process of household reorganization after divorce

Abstract

Social support has been shown to be important in the world of single parents. As for divorce, social support is mostly studied in a static way in academic research. Divorcing and/or separating people are in a dynamic state of a changing need for social support. This need changes over time within their process of becoming a single parent. In this article, we propose a more dynamic perspective on social support in the process of household reorganization after divorce. We argue that single parents move on after divorce and work toward a new conciliation of their responsibilities at home and at the labor market, using their social network. This resulted from a grounded theory analysis, conducted using 30 unstructured interviews that were then compared within an elaborative population of an additional 244 semi-structured interviews in order to develop a six-phase model of family reorganization after divorce.