Madison

Chapmon
UWRT 1103: Campbell
2/7/15

Introduction/Overview:
The topic that Ive been interested in is the changes in divorce rate in the US
and what causes it to rise and decline. Growing up I witnessed many of my
childhood friends suffering from hardship as their parents chose to divorce, more so
than not. It got to the point where if one of my friends told me that their parents
were getting a divorced, I was no longer surprised. In 8th grade my friend Sydney
came up to me one day at school and told me that her parents were getting a
divorced and I was so surprised and confused. Within the same year I discovered
that my friend Lanes parents were getting a divorce too. It just kept becoming more
common and I was becoming less and less surprised.
There is a list of different reasons to why so many marriages end up in
divorces nowadays and that list could go on for forever. People have their own
reasons to blame due to their own personal experiences or observations, but there
is more than just one reason to why divorce rates are changing amongst us. Most of
us think that divorce rates have just started to rise over the past couple of decades,
but as a matter of fact, studies from the American Psychological Association were
more common in the 60s and 70s than they are now! Divorce rates seem to be
somewhat unpredictable. Research from the Encyclopedia of Psychology states that
When society changes, divorce does too. As society changes, many people change
along with it. Federal or states laws have changed, individual values have changed,
views on certain worldly issues have changed, and personalities have changed and

all of these topics will continue to change. There are reasons to why divorce rates
had a dramatic rise back in the 70s and there are reasons to why they are
unpredictable nowadays.

Initial Inquiry Question(s):
v What are the effects on children when parents are getting divorced?
v What caused the dramatic increase of divorce rates in the 60s and 70s?
v Will divorce rates continue to increase of decrease?
v Is the husband more likely to divorce the wife or vice versa?
v What caused divorce rates to stop increasing dramatically after the 80s?

My Interest in this Topic:
Im interested in this topic because Ive always wondered about divorce
statistics and why theyre constantly changing. People are getting divorced every
day and it doesnt seem like such a big deal to anyone anymore, Id like to learn what
to do and what not to do whenever Im thinking about getting married. I want to
know what causes most marriages to most likely end in divorce and why its
changing so much. I always thought that divorce rates have never stopped
increasing and they will always be increasing, but when I started researching this
topic and discovered how divorces were occurring more rapidly 40-50 years ago. I
was shocked to find this out and I want to know why they became so common.

Next Steps:

Next I plan to further my research by going more in depth online and going to

the library to see if there are any books covering the divorce rates of America. I want
to see some statistics regarding the increase and decrease of divorce rate over the
years and see if they are close to what Ive expected them to be or far from it.

I think that you could add more detail to you topic proposal. You could be
more specific with your next steps section, what specific website will you use to do
your research. What are some different arguments for or against divorce? You could
go more in depth with your introduction, how did your friends feelings about
divorce change over time? Did it affect them in anyway knowing that other people
their age were going through the same thing?