divorce, class, cohabitation

This study tested whether relationship education (i.e., the Prevention and Relationship Education Program; PREP) can mitigate the risk of having cohabited before making a mutual commitment to marry (i.e., "precommitment cohabitation") for marital distress and divorce. Using data from a study of PREP for married couples in the U.S. Army (N = 662 couples), we found that there was a significant association between precommitment cohabitation and lower marital satisfaction and dedication before random assignment to intervention...

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education - divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not...

A random multistate sample of married individuals ( N = 1,931) was used to explore whether more positive attitudes toward divorce and weaker commitment to marriage may contribute to the greater instability of remarriages than first marriages. Remarried adults, whether or not they brought children from a previous union into the remarriage, reported marital quality (happiness and conflict) equal to those in first marriages. They also reported more positive attitudes toward divorce, which were associated with higher divorce proneness (i...

PURPOSE: Our study documents how the divorce rate among persons aged 50 and older has changed between 1990 and 2010 and identifies the sociodemographic correlates of divorce among today's middle-aged and older adults. DESIGN AND METHOD: We used data from the 1990 U.S. Vital Statistics Report and the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to examine the change in the divorce rate over time. ACS data were analyzed to determine the sociodemographic correlates of divorce...

Young Americans increasingly express apprehension about their ability to successfully manage intimate relationships. Partially in response, cohabitation has become normative over the past few decades. Little research, however, examines social class distinctions in how emerging adults perceive challenges to sustaining intimate unions. We examine cohabitors' views of divorce and how these color their sentiments regarding marriage. Data are from in-depth interviews with 122 working- and middle-class cohabitors...

This study builds on Becker's and Oppenheimer's theories of union formation to examine the economic determinants of marriage and cohabitation during older adulthood. Based on the 1998-2006 Health and Retirement Study and a sample of previously married Americans who are at least 50 years old, results show that wealthier older adults, regardless of gender, are more likely to repartner than stay single. Wealth has no discernable effect on the likelihood of remarrying versus cohabiting. Among the oldest men, the positive associations between wealth and repartnering are entirely due to housing assets...

Over the past quarter-century, many covariates of divorce have been identified. However, the extent to which the effects of these covariates remain constant across time is not known. In this article, I examine the stability of the effects of a wide range of divorce covariates using a pooled sample of data taken from five rounds of the National Survey of Family Growth. This sample includes consistent measures of important predictors of divorce, covers marriages formed over 35 years (1950-1984), and spans substantial historical variation in the overall risk of marital dissolution...