1. Introduction
The quality of marriage is an important guarantee of well-being [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5]. In China’s traditional marriage culture, “a woman follows her husband no matter what his lot is” is a commonly held belief, and divorce is often seen as a stigma [
6]. However, China’s divorce rates have appreciably risen in the 21st century. As shown in
Figure 1, since 2001 the crude divorce rate (the number of divorces per 1000 population) increased from 0.98‰ to 3.02‰ in 2016 [
7]. The increasing divorce rate in China, a country that has been heavily influenced by traditional marriage concepts, has attracted extensive attention from scholars in recent years [
8,
9,
10].
Some scholars attribute the rising divorce rate in China to the rapid urbanization, marketization, industrialization, modern education development, and economic growth, etc., during the past 40 years, and those factors may contribute to changes in people's attitudes and beliefs, which can lead to shifts in family structure, functioning, and relationships [
11,
12]. However, these factors do not explain why China’s divorce rate remained low and did not change much in the 1990s (as shown in the
Figure 1).
The main purpose of this paper is to explain the rising divorce rate in China from the perspective of the increasing mobile phone penetration in recent years. With the development of information and communication technology (ICT) in recent decades, the mobile phone has become a major communication tool [
13]. Since 2005, the global mobile-cellular telephone penetration grew from 33.9% to 103.5% in 2017 [
14]. The rapid spread of mobile phones has brought the world into a digital era, which has had a profound impact on economy, culture, and politics [
15,
16], and has greatly expanded the scope of interpersonal communication [
17]. The rise in the mobile phone penetration may have the following effects on China’s divorce rate:
(1) The popularity of mobile phone, whether for unmarried or married people, can greatly reduce the cost of searching for romantic partners. With the development of smart phones, mobile phone functions have become more and more diverse, which has had a significant impact on people’s dating behaviours. Various social platforms and mobile phone applications, such as WeChat (Tencent, Shenzhen, China) and QQ (Tencent, Shenzhen, China), can closely connect individuals with common interests, offer a convenient condition for extramarital affairs, and increase the possibility of divorce. (2) The popularity of mobile phones has affected people’s interpersonal relationships and the relationship between couples. (3) The spread of mobile phones has accelerated the spread of modern marriage concepts in China. Nowadays, especially for young people, mobile phones have become one of the most important tools for connecting to the Internet in order to find whatever information is needed. More and more people use mobile Internet to search for laws and regulations related to marriage, especially for couples experiencing marriage crises who may use mobile Internet to communicate with more people in common situations. As a result, people may be more daring to say goodbye to a failed marriage than to think that divorce is a shameful act.
The main contribution of this paper is embodied in the following three aspects. First of all, previous studies have tended to ignore the impact of advances in information technology on divorce rate, and the few relevant studies that have previously been published have mainly been based in developed countries. As a first attempt, this paper examines the explicit relationship between mobile phone penetration and divorce rate based on China’s macro data at the provincial level, thus expanding on previous established research. Secondly, China is committed to the construction of a “harmonious society”, and marital happiness is considered to be an important embodiment of a “harmonious society”. Simultaneously, divorce may potentially result in negative effects on both health and well-being [
18]. Therefore, this paper has many implications for Chinese public policy in the future. Furthermore, many countries in the world regard ICT as an important driving force for the promotion of the sustainable development of economy and society and the improvement of people’s welfare [
19]. Given the increasingly prominent role of mobile phones in people’s daily lives, understanding their influence on individuals and families is crucial [
20,
21,
22]. Thirdly, in this paper, the robustness and endogeneity of the model are considered rigorously and fully, which makes the conclusion more reliable.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows.
Section 2 briefly reviews the existing theory and literature.
Section 3 presents the econometric model and data description.
Section 4 provides the empirical results and relevant discussions. Finally, the
Section 5 summarizes the conclusions drawn from this research.
4. Empirical Results and Discussions
4.1. Statistical Analysis of Variables
In summary, the mean, standard deviation, maximum, and minimum values of key variables are shown in
Table 1. Furthermore, this paper conducted multiple collinear tests on the main explanatory variables before the empirical analysis, and the highest variance inflation factor (VIF) is 4.73. Experience shows that when VIF is less than 10, multiple collinearity does not have much effect on regression analysis [
98].
4.2. Estimation Results of the Benchmark Model
Generally speaking, panel data estimation models include the ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects model (FE), and random effects model (RE);
F test and the Hausman test were conducted to select the most appropriate model. Considering the possible heteroscedasticity and the autocorrelation of the panel model, this paper used the clustering robust standard deviation in all results. The regression results of the benchmark model are shown in
Table 2.
As shown in
Table 2, Model (1) only considers the influence of control variables on the divorce rate. Model (2) simply investigates the direct relationship between mobile phone penetration and divorce rate. Models (3)–(6) add the control variables successively on the basis of model (2). From the R
2 value of each model, Models (2)–(6) increase by degrees. At the same time, The R
2 value of Model (6) is also larger than that in Model (1), indicating that it is necessary to add the control variables and that the model is set appropriately. According to the estimation results, it can be seen that:
According to Model (2), the direct influence coefficient of mobile phone penetration on the divorce rate is 0.02 and is significant at the 1% level. This indicates that a 1% increase in the mobile phone penetration rate was associated with a 0.02‰ increase in the divorce rate. The regression coefficient for the mobile phone penetration in Model (6) reduces, but it is still statistically significant at 1% level. The result shows that a 1% increase in the mobile phone penetration rate was associated with a 0.011‰ increase in the divorce rate during this period. As shown in
Figure 3, there was a significant positive correlation between mobile phone penetration and divorce rate.
For the control variables, Model (6) shows that both the urbanization level and the human capital level have significantly positive coefficients. This indicates that improvements to urbanization and education levels were important contributing factors for the increase in China’s divorce rate in this period. As the largest developing country and the most populous country, China has seen rapid economic development since the late 1970s. However, China has not completed the urbanization process. China’s urbanization rate was just 57.3% in 2016 according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Therefore, with the advancement of China’s urbanization process, China’s public policy should pay more attention to the influence of the rising urbanization level on the concept of marriage across Chinese society. Additionally, the estimation results revealed that there was a significant positive correlation between dependency ratio and divorce rate. Perhaps the reason is that the growth of the dependency ratio significantly increased the cost of living and the stress of life, which have an impact on marriage. Furthermore, the policy change on divorce had an important effect on divorce rate, which means that China’s “Marriage Registration Ordinance”, amended in 2003, contributed to the increase in divorce rate.
4.3. Mobile Phone Penetration and Divorce Rate: Regional Differences
Considering the big differences for divorce rates and mobile telephone penetrations among the 31 provinces in China, this study further divided the sample into three parts: the eastern, central, and western regions of China according to the usual methods. As shown in
Table 3, Models (1) and (2) show the results of the eastern provinces. Models (3) and (4) show the results for the central provinces. Finally, Models (5) and (6) show the results for the western provinces.
Specifically, from a regional perspective: Model (1) and Model (2) show that the association between the mobile phone penetration rate and divorce rate was positive and significant for eastern provinces. According to Model (2), a 1% increase in the mobile phone penetration rate was associated with a 0.006‰ increase in the divorce rate during this period. Model (3) and Model (4) reveal that the association between the mobile phone penetration rate and divorce rate was also positive and significant for central provinces, with a 1% increase in the mobile phone penetration rate associated with a 0.030‰ increase in the divorce rate. For the western region, the influence coefficient of mobile phone penetration on the divorce rate in Model (5) is significantly positive. However, after controlling for other variables, Model (6) shows that there is no direct relationship between mobile phone penetration and divorce rate.
By comparison, mobile phone penetration had the largest effect on the divorce rate in central China, followed by eastern China, but it was not obvious in western China during this period. Compared with the central and western regions of China, the eastern region of China has experienced a relatively fast economic development, a high degree of marketability, and higher average human capital. Therefore, the modern marriage concept is more popular and deeply ingrained in society. As a result, despite the high prevalence of mobile phones, the modern concept of marriage has not been impacted much. In the central regions, the economic development has been relatively slow, the industrialization degree is low, and the traditional culture and religious culture have a higher influence on marriage. Therefore, with the popularization of new media tools such as mobile phones, greater effects on traditional concepts of marriage and interpersonal communication may be experienced in the central regions. For western China, there was no direct link between mobile phone penetration and divorce rates. That may be because, on the one hand, the mobile penetration in western China was still low. On the other hand, especially for the vast rural areas in western China, traditional marriage concepts still have a deep impact.
4.4. Robust Analysis
Additional analyses were conducted to assess the stability of our research conclusions. As discussed above, this paper used the Divorce1 variable (divorce rate for the marriage-age population) to replace the Divorce variable (crude divorce rate) for additional analyses. The results are shown in
Table 4. It can be observed that the results are substantively identical to the results shown in
Table 2 and
Table 3, which supports the conclusion that there was significant positive correlation between the mobile phone penetration rate and the divorce rate during the period 2001–2016. Furthermore, the mobile phone penetration rate had the largest effect on the divorce rate in central China, followed by eastern China, but it was not obvious in western China during this period.
Moreover, considering our sample contains provinces with different levels of divorce rate, mobile phone penetration, urbanization, education, and economic development, this paper uses quantile regression to further test the reliability of benchmark model at the national level. Compared with the traditional method, which just examines the effect of the independent variable on the conditional expectation of the dependent variable, the advantage of quantile regression is that it can provide comprehensive information about the conditional distribution of the dependent variable [
99]. In this paper, quantile regression was mainly used to investigate the effect of mobile phone penetration on divorce rate at five points including: 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 0.9. The estimation results are shown in
Table 5, and
Figure 4 shows the variation in the mobile phone penetration coefficient over the conditional quantiles.
According to the results in
Table 5 and
Figure 4, the mobile phone penetration has a significantly positive effect on divorce rate for all quantiles, which is consistent with the benchmark model estimation results in
Table 2. In summary, the above analysis shows that the estimation results are robust and reliable in this paper.
4.5. The Lagged Effect of Mobile Phone Penetration on Divorce Rate
Measurement errors, omitted variables, and mutual causal relationships among the independent variable with the dependent variables may all lead to endogenous problems. In this paper, a mutual relationship between the mobile phone penetration rate and the divorce rate may exist. With the increase in divorce rates, the dating behaviour of people (e.g., using mobile phones to meet people) and the holding rate of mobile phones may possibly change. Generally, two approaches are used to solve endogenous problems. One way is to use instrumental variables that are highly relevant to mobile phone penetration rate but do not have direct relationships with divorce rate. Another method is to add the lag term of endogenous variables. However, it is difficult to find an appropriate instrumental variable for mobile phone penetration. As such, this paper adopts the latter method of applying the lag term of mobile phone penetration. The main logic is that the divorce rate in the current period has no effect on the lag of the mobile phone penetration rate. In addition, theoretically, there is a time lag between residents’ use of mobile phones and the possible impact on divorce rates. This paper successively added the one-year to five-year lag times of the mobile phone penetration; the estimation results are shown in
Table 6. Furthermore, adding different lag terms of mobile phone penetrations is valuable in order to observe the dynamic impact of mobile phone penetration on divorce rate. Since the adoption of the lag term of mobile phone penetration would reduce the sample size, this paper conducts the analysis only at the national level.
Models (1)–(5) are the estimation results with the crude divorce rate as the dependent variable, and Models (6)–(10) are the estimation results with divorce rate for the marriage-age population as the dependent variable. As shown in
Table 6, there was still significant positive relationships between the lag term of mobile phone penetration and divorce rate, which is consistent with the process of “Mobile phone use → Making friends → Having an affair → Having family conflict → Divorce” [
100]. It was shown that the mobile phone penetration had a dynamic impact process on the divorce rate. In addition, according to the R
2 value and the mobile phone penetration coefficient of each model, the mobile phone penetration rate with one lag period has the greatest impact and predictive ability on the divorce rate.
5. Discussion
Marital happiness is of great practical significance to China’s social stability and economic sustainable development in the future. In traditional Chinese society, interpersonal communication is often based on blood ties, and men and women are limited in their choice of partners. Furthermore, traditional Chinese societal values typically look unfavourably upon, which still has a profound impact on the marriage concepts of modern Chinese residents. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, the divorce rate in China has risen rapidly compared with that before the 21st century, which has attracted wide attention from various social institutions. Previous literature has explained the rising divorce rate in China from various aspects, such as economic development and social reform, but few studies have paid attention to the possible significant impact of the popularization of mobile phones on China’s divorce rate. Moreover, this is of great value in explaining why the divorce rate in China has changed so much since the beginning of the 21st century.
Therefore, this paper attempts to study the relationship between the mobile phone penetration and the divorce rate in China based on province-level data during the period 2001–2016. The most striking conclusion of this study is that there was a significant positive correlation between the mobile phone penetration and the divorce rate in China during the period 2001–2016. Furthermore, mobile phone penetration had the largest effect on the divorce rate in central China, followed by eastern China, but it was not obvious in western China during this period.
In order to get a more robust conclusion, this paper further conducts the robustness test through two steps. Firstly, two indexes of divorce rate are adopted as the dependent variables. Secondly, this paper uses quantile regression to further test the reliability of the benchmark model at the national level. Although no suitable instrumental variables were found to deal with the possible endogenous problem caused by mobile phone penetration, the one-year to five-year lag times of mobile phone penetrations are used as the core explanatory variable to deal with endogeneity problem and to analyse the possible delayed impact of mobile phone penetration on divorce rate. Through the above tests, the main conclusions of this paper are still reliable and robust.
China is vigorously promoting the construction of a digital economy and trying to promote the sustainable development of the Chinese economy through information technology. Information technology has had a profound impact on Chinese society. Although for a long time, the relationship between social media tools, such as the Internet and mobile phones, and the divorce rate was recognized by scholars, little research has been done to explain the rising divorce rate in China in recent years from the perspective of the spread of mobile phones.
In the theoretical analysis part of this paper, three reasons are provided for the mobile phone penetration contributing to the rising divorce rate in China. First, the spread of mobile phones has affected people’s social networks and greatly reduced the cost of searching for partners for both men and women. Secondly, the use of mobile phones can affect people’s interpersonal communication, thus affecting the relationships between couples. Finally, the popularization of mobile phones promotes the spread of modern marriage concepts, democracy concepts, and equality concepts.
Why does mobile phone penetration have the largest effect on the divorce rate in central China, followed by eastern China, but not have an obvious effect in western China during this period? This paper argues that, compared with central and western of China, the eastern part of China has experienced a relatively fast economic development, a high degree of marketability, and a higher average human capital. Therefore, the modern marriage concept is more popular and deeply ingrained in society. As a result, despite the high prevalence of mobile phones, the modern concept of marriage has not been impacted much. In the central regions, the economic development has been relatively slow, the industrialization degree is low, and the traditional culture and religious culture have a higher influence on marriage. Therefore, with the popularization of new media tools such as mobile phones, greater effects on traditional concepts of marriage may be experienced in the central regions. For western China, there is no direct link between mobile phone penetration and divorce rates. That may be because, on the one hand, mobile penetration in western China is still low. On the other hand, especially for the vast rural areas in western China, the traditional marriage concept still has a deep impact on the values and beliefs of residents.
The results are consistent with Valenzuela et al. [
64] in that the use of social media tools (mobile phones in this study) is positively correlated with experiencing a troubled relationship and thinking about divorce. These findings shall inspire China and other countries in the future. The quality of marriage is an important guarantee for a happy life and harmonious society. With the development of the economy in developing countries, ICT will be further popularized and applied. Thus, public policy formulation should consider the potential impact of ICT on marriage stability in the future. Deciding how to guide and standardize the behaviour of citizens using mobile phones is an important issue to be considered in public policy. This paper also further enriches relevant studies on the impact of ICT on social development.
There are still many aspects that can be further explored in the future. Firstly, future research may use smaller geographical units (such as cities) and family or individual data, which will be better able to investigate the relationship between mobile phone use and the risk of divorce for particular couples. Secondly, a common issue involving endogenous problems was encountered in this study due to the lack of suitable tool variables for mobile phone penetration. As such, endogenous problems are not solved perfectly in this paper. However, future research can address this problem by other means, such as through approaches using Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and propensity score matching (PSM). Finally, future studies can also empirically examine the mechanisms by which mobile phone penetration affects divorce rate.