July 12, 2013 | News

Poster Award for Christine Schnor

PhD student Christine Schnor was awarded a poster prize during the international workshop “Life Course Transition after Separation“.

From July 4 – 5, 2013, the international workshop “Life Course Transition after Separation: Stepfamilies, Lone and Non-residential Parenthood“ was held in Berlin. At that event, doctoral student Christine Schnor, from the MPIDR, was awarded a prize for her poster presentation. The poster presented first results from Christine Schnor ‘s studies on partnership stability in step-families. She has looked at the extent of separation risk when at household formation the partners have children from previous partnerships or when they already have children together. Her results show that two factors positively affect union stability. One of these two factors is having children together, but this only applies when these were not born before the household formation. The other factor is the duration of the relationship prior to that formation. That is, the longer the “dating period”, the more probable it is that the couple stays together over the long run.

The workshop , co-organized by MPIDR-researcher Michaela Kreyenfeld, focused on “new” family forms: stepfamilies and separated parents, an issue addressed by Christine Schnor, too. This family type has drastically increased during the last decades owing to rising separation and divorce rates. The workshop gathered around 60 scientists from various disciplines, researching into families, and taking very different perspectives, such as post-separation legal issues, the effects of union dissolution on the children in question, and the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in these step families.