Hi. I’m trying to find out if there is a published dataset which covers how families were split after divorce in the UK, preferably going back to at least 1990.
Specifically I’m looking to see whether there was any gender bias with regard to which parent gained custody of the children. Did mothers tend to get the children, did female children tend to go to the mother more than male children and so on.
It would be incredibly useful if the age ranges of the children were included, but I might just be wishing for the moon on a stick.
My google-karma is normally quite good, but not today it seems.
tim
Children involved in divorce cases, from the Office for National Statistics, should have some of what you need. Whether you’ll get all your answers, I don’t know, for various reasons. The first obvious one is that custody is a different matter from divorce, settled separately. The second that comes to mind is that while cases settled through official means would be easy to collate, gathering data on cases where there has been no disagreement and a private arrangement has been reached will be a lot harder. The third thing to watch out for is whether particular sets of data relate to the UK, England & Wales, or just England!
Thanks GorillaMan. Thats given me something to start with!
tim