Going steady
Can Pro-Marriage Policies Work? An Analysis of Marginal Marriages
Wolfgang Frimmel, Martin Halla & Rudolf Winter-Ebmer
Demography, August 2014, Pages 1357-1379
Abstract:
Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, one must distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the absence of a state intervention (average marriage). We exploit the suspension of a cash-on-hand marriage subsidy in Austria to examine the differential behavior of marginal and average marriages. The announcement of an impending suspension of this subsidy led to an enormous marriage boom among eligible couples that allows us to locate marginal marriages. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we show that marginal marriages are surprisingly as stable as average marriages but produce fewer children, children later in marriage, and children who are less healthy at birth.
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Free to Leave? A Welfare Analysis of Divorce Regimes
Raquel Fernández & Joyce Cheng Wong
NBER Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
During the 1970s the US underwent an important change in its divorce laws, switching from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefitted and who lost from this change? To answer this question we develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, labor force participation (LFP), and marriage and divorce decisions subject to several shocks and given a particular divorce regime. We calibrate the model using statistics relevant to the life-cycle of the 1940 cohort. Conditioning solely on gender, our ex ante welfare analysis finds that women would fare better under mutual consent whereas men would prefer a unilateral system. Once we condition not only on gender but also on initial productivity, we find that men in the top three quintiles of the initial productivity distribution are made better off by a unilateral system as are the top two quintiles of women; the rest prefer mutual consent. We also find that although the change in divorce regime had only a small effect on the LFP of married women in the 1940 cohort, these effects would be considerably larger for a cohort who lived its entire life under a unilateral divorce system.
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Karen Benjamin Guzzo
Journal of Marriage and Family, August 2014, Pages 826–842
Abstract:
Cohabitation is now the modal first union for young adults, and most marriages are preceded by cohabitation even as fewer cohabitations transition to marriage. These contrasting trends may be due to compositional shifts among cohabiting unions, which are increasingly heterogeneous in terms of cohabitation order, engagement, and the presence of children, as well as across socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. The author constructs 5-year cohabitation cohorts for 18- to 34-year-olds from the 2002 and 2006–2010 cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth (n = 17,890 premarital cohabitations) to examine the outcomes of cohabitations over time. Compared to earlier cohabitations, those formed after 1995 were more likely to dissolve, and those formed after 2000 were less likely to transition to marriage even after accounting for the compositional shifts among individuals in cohabiting unions. Higher instability and decreased chances of marriage occurred among both engaged and non-engaged individuals, suggesting society-wide changes in cohabitation over time.
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Earnings Equality and Relationship Stability for Same-Sex and Heterosexual Couples
Katherine Weisshaar
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines a topic of continuing interest for demographers and sociologists of the family: which factors promote relationship stability among couples. Two competing theories have been highly debated to explain how relative earnings relate to relationship quality and stability. The neoclassical economic theory posits that specialization of home and work duties leads to stability because partners fill complementary roles. Gender scholars propose an alternative explanation, suggesting that when couples violate the traditional male-breadwinner model, they experience relationship strain and are more likely to experience a breakup. Using the new How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) data set, this paper offers a unique perspective on the debate, by comparing same-sex couples to heterosexual couples. The paper presents three sets of analyses to determine how relative earnings relate to relationship stability. The first analysis employs discrete-time event history models to assess the likelihood of breakup for both heterosexual and same-sex cohabiting couples. Next, the paper presents results predicting self-reported relationship quality among married and cohabiting couples. The final analysis focuses on non-cohabiting couples from wave I of the HCMST survey and examines the likelihood of entering cohabitation in subsequent survey waves. Results demonstrate that the economic or specialization model does not hold in same-sex relationships, suggesting that the effect of earnings equality is dependent upon gender norms in heterosexual relationships. When earnings power is disentangled from gender, as in the case of same-sex couples, equality in earnings promotes stability.
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Sarah Stanton, Lorne Campbell & Timothy Loving
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We assessed the impact of thinking of a current romantic partner on acute blood glucose responses and positive affect over a short period of time. Participants in romantic relationships were randomly assigned to reflect on their partner, an opposite-sex friend, or their morning routine. Blood glucose levels were assessed prior to reflection, as well as at 10 and 25 min postreflection. Results revealed that individuals in the routine and friend conditions exhibited a decline in glucose over time, whereas individuals in the partner condition did not exhibit this decline (rather, a slight increase) in glucose over time. Reported positive affect following reflection was positively associated with increases in glucose, but only for individuals who reflected on their partner, suggesting this physiological response reflects eustress. These findings add to the literature on eustress in relationships and have implications for relationship processes.
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Do Daughters Really Cause Divorce? Stress, Pregnancy, and Family Composition
Amar Hamoudi & Jenna Nobles
Demography, August 2014, Pages 1423-1449
Abstract:
Provocative studies have reported that in the United States, marriages producing firstborn daughters are more likely to divorce than those producing firstborn sons. The findings have been interpreted as contemporary evidence of fathers’ son preference. Our study explores the potential role of another set of dynamics that may drive these patterns: namely, selection into live birth. Epidemiological evidence indicates that the characteristic female survival advantage may begin before birth. If stress accompanying unstable marriages has biological effects on fecundity, a female survival advantage could generate an association between stability and the sex composition of offspring. Combining regression and simulation techniques to analyze real-world data, we ask, How much of the observed association between sex of the firstborn child and risk of divorce could plausibly be accounted for by the joint effects of female survival advantage and reduced fecundity associated with unstable marriage? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we find that relationship conflict predicts the sex of children born after conflict was measured; conflict also predicts subsequent divorce. Conservative specification of parameters linking pregnancy characteristics, selection into live birth, and divorce are sufficient to generate a selection-driven association between offspring sex and divorce, which is consequential in magnitude. Our findings illustrate the value of demographic accounting of processes which occur before birth — a period when many outcomes of central interest in the population sciences begin to take shape.
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Love You? Hate You? Maybe It’s Both: Evidence That Significant Others Trigger Bivalent-Priming
Vivian Zayas & Yuichi Shoda
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and intuition all suggest that human beings can be profoundly ambivalent about significant others. However, experimental psychology has commonly assessed automatic evaluations as either positive or negative, but not both simultaneously. Experiment 1 showed that activating the mental representation of a significant other facilitated the processing of both positive and negative information (bivalent-priming). In contrast, replicating past work, activating the mental representation of an object facilitated classification of only valence-congruent targets and inhibited classification of valence-incongruent targets (univalent-priming). Experiment 2 demonstrated that these results were not attributable to alternative accounts, such as arousal. The results support the long-held proposition that significant others automatically facilitate coactivation of positive and negative and that commonly used relative (good vs. bad) measures of automatic evaluation may not capture this affective complexity.
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His and Hers: Economic Factors and Relationship Quality in Germany
Jessica Halliday Hardie, Claudia Geist & Amy Lucas
Journal of Marriage and Family, August 2014, Pages 728–743
Abstract:
Research has linked economic factors to relationship quality in the United States, primarily using cross-sectional data. In the current study, 2 waves of the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics data (n = 2,937) were used to test the gendered association between economic factors and relationship satisfaction among young German couples. In contrast to U.S.-based studies, the findings showed striking gender differences in the association between economic factors and relationship satisfaction for Germans. In cross-sectional models, women's relationship satisfaction was positively associated with receiving government economic support, and men's satisfaction was positively associated with poverty status and negatively associated with being a breadwinner. Longitudinal models revealed that changes in poverty status are associated with women's satisfaction, but men's satisfaction remains tied to their role as family provider. These unexpected results suggest that men's satisfaction is positively associated with a more equal division of labor market activity between partners.
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Olga Stavrova & Detlef Fetchenhauer
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research of personal relationships has typically linked childbearing in cohabiting (compared to married) couples to decreased well-being. Using data from 24 European countries, we show that this effect is not universal; rather, it is restricted to countries with a strong social norm that proscribes childbearing in cohabiting unions. We examine two potential mechanisms of this effect; the personal norm (cohabiting parents are worse off because their status deviates from their own expectations) and social norm (cohabiting parents are worse off because they experience external social sanctions, such as social disapproval) mechanisms. Our results provide support for the social norm mechanism. First, the detrimental effect related to a country’s social norm exists even for cohabiting parents who personally favor childbearing in cohabiting couples. Second, in countries with a strong norm against childbearing in cohabiting unions, cohabiting parents feel that they are less respected than married couples, which contributes to lower levels of life satisfaction.
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Relational consequences of personal goal pursuits
Laura VanderDrift & Christopher Agnew
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 2014, Pages 927-940
Abstract:
Individuals balance tasks necessary to fulfill personal goals and to maintain their interpersonal relationships. In the current studies, we examined the impact of personal goal pursuits on how individuals process and respond to events in their romantic relationships. In 5 experiments, we examined consequences of motivationally active personal goals for relationships. Results indicated that when individuals focused on pursuing a personal goal, they processed relationship information in an evaluatively polarized (Study 1), one-sided (Study 2) fashion. Relative to those deliberating about a personal goal, those focused on a personal goal reported less willingness to engage in some kinds of pro-relationship behaviors (Study 3) and were more likely to forego an opportunity to improve their relationship (Study 4). We attribute this pattern of findings to processing that shielded the personal goal from goal-irrelevant influence (Study 5). These findings provide a greater understanding of how pursuing a personal goal can undermine relationships.
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Gender Equality Perceptions, Division of Paid and Unpaid Work, and Partnership Dissolution in Sweden
Livia Sz. Oláh & Michael Gähler
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
With the increase in female employment and the decrease in gender labor specialization, there has also been a marked change in gender role attitudes. An increasing proportion of women and men has come to prefer gender egalitarianism. Yet a marked gender division of labor persists. Here, we study the interplay between individual gender role attitudes and behavior in terms of sharing paid and unpaid work with one's partner, and implications for partnership stability. We focus on Sweden, a country with long experience of the dual-earner model and policies supporting female labor-force participation while also promoting men's active engagement in family tasks. We test two hypotheses: first, that gender egalitarianism in attitudes and behavior per se strengthens partnership stability (the gender egalitarian model) and second, that consistency in individual attitudes and couple behavior, whether egalitarian or traditional, strengthens partnership stability (the attitude-behavior consistency model). We use data from the Swedish Young Adult Panel Study (YAPS) conducted in 1999, 2003, and 2009. We find no difference in dissolution risk between the consistent egalitarian and the consistent traditional individuals, and both categories exhibit lower dissolution risks than individuals holding gender egalitarian views but dividing workload with their spouse/partner in a gender-traditional way. These results speak in favor of the attitude-behavior consistency model of marriage.
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Danielle Young, Corinne Moss-Racusin & Diana Sanchez
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2014, Pages 133–138
Abstract:
Men and women are expected to exemplify the gendered traits of agency (masculinity) and communality (femininity). Research has yet to examine how the implicit adoption of these traits influences close relationships. To address these gaps, the current study used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in a dyadic context to examine whether or not these implicit traits, and perceptual congruence (i.e., seeing one’s partner as they see themselves) regarding these traits, relate to relationship health in mixed-sex couples. Results revealed that when both partners implicitly viewed themselves as the more agentic partner, relationship health suffered. Having one or both partners identify as more communal resulted in greater relationship health. Results were equally positive regardless of whether couples implicitly viewed their relationship traditionally (i.e., perceiving the male as the more agentic partner and the female as the more communal partner) or non-traditionally (i.e., perceiving the female as more agentic, and the male as more communal). Implications for interpersonal relationships are discussed.
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Implicit Self-Evaluations Predict Changes in Implicit Partner Evaluations
James McNulty, Levi Baker & Michael Olson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do people who feel good about themselves have better relations with others? Although the notion that they do is central to both classic and modern theories, there is little strong evidence to support it. We argue that one reason for the lack of evidence is that prior research has relied exclusively on explicit measures of self- and relationship evaluation. The current longitudinal study of newlywed couples used implicit measures of self- and partner evaluation, as well as explicit measures of self-, relationship, and partner evaluation, to examine the link between self-evaluations and changes in relationship evaluations over the first 3 years of marriage. Whereas explicit self-evaluations were unrelated to changes in all interpersonal measures, implicit self-evaluations positively predicted changes in implicit partner evaluations. This finding adds to previous research by highlighting the importance of automatic processes and implicit measures in the study of close interpersonal relationships.
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Meaningfulness of Service and Marital Satisfaction in Army Couples
Jeffrey Bergmann et al.
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The vast numbers of military service members who have been deployed since 2001 highlights the need to better understand relationships of military couples. A unique consideration in military couples is the concept of meaningfulness of service, or the value service members and their partners place on military service in spite of the sacrifices it requires. In a sample of 606 Army couples, the authors used path analysis to examine how male service members’ and female spouses’ perceived meaningfulness of service added to the prediction of marital satisfaction in both members of the couple, when accounting for service members’ PTSD symptoms. Spouses’ perceived meaningfulness of service was linked with higher marital satisfaction in spouses, regardless of service member’s perceived meaningfulness of service. Service members’ perceived meaningfulness of service was also associated with increased marital satisfaction in service members, but only when their spouses also perceived higher meaningfulness. There were no significant interactions between service members’ PTSD and either partner’s perceived meaningfulness. Implications for enhanced attention to spousal perceptions of meaningfulness of service are discussed.
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Sarah Gomillion et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Self-control allows people to curb destructive behavior and behave more pro-socially in relationships. Thus, individuals generally trust partners with high dispositional self-control more. However, it is not clear whether partner self-control influences individuals’ responses to acutely risky situations, such as when partners are rejecting. A daily diary study of married and cohabiting couples examined whether actors with high self-control partners behave less self-protectively in risky situations. On days partners were highly rejecting, actors were less likely to retaliate against and more likely to value high self-control partners. On days after partners had been rejecting, actors also reported that high self-control partners behaved more responsively. Actors also trusted partners with high self-control more regardless of risk. Taken together, our findings suggest that partners’ greater self-control may help foster more positive interaction cycles in romantic relationships.
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Cohort differences in the marriage–health relationship for midlife women
Nicky Newton et al.
Social Science & Medicine, September 2014, Pages 64–72
Abstract:
The present study aimed to identify potential cohort differences in midlife women's self-reported functional limitations and chronic diseases. Additionally, we examined the relationship between marital status and health, comparing the health of divorced, widowed, and never married women with married women, and how this relationship differs by cohort. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we examined potential differences in the level of functional limitations and six chronic diseases in two age-matched cohorts of midlife women in the United States: Pre-Baby Boomers, born 1933–1942, N = 4574; and Early Baby Boomers, born 1947–1956, N = 2098. Linear and logistic regressions tested the marital status/health relationship, as well as cohort differences in this relationship, controlling for age, education, race, number of marriages, length of time in marital status, physical activity, and smoking status. We found that Early Baby Boom women had fewer functional limitations but higher risk of chronic disease diagnosis compared to Pre-Baby Boom women. In both cohorts, marriage was associated with lower disease risk and fewer functional limitations; however, never-married Early Baby Boom women had more functional limitations, as well as greater likelihood of lung disease than their Pre-Baby Boom counterparts (OR = 0.28). Results are discussed in terms of the stress model of marriage, and the association between historical context and cohort health (e.g., the influence of economic hardship vs. economic prosperity). Additionally, we discuss cohort differences in selection into marital status, particularly as they pertain to never-married women, and the relative impact of marital dissolution on physical health for the two cohorts of women.