Robert Schoen

Do fertility intentions affect fertility behavior

This paper examines the relationship between fertility intentions and fertility behavior using the data from the National Survey of Families and Households with a sample of 2812 non-Hispanic Whites. Results demonstrated a strong relationship between fertility intentions and the percentage of having a birth. It was also noted that the effect on fertility is greater when the intentions are held with greater certainty. Furthermore fertility intentions and their certainty predict fertility behavior better among married persons as compared to all other variables in the model. Thus marital status is an important life course variable wherein a change in marital status significantly affects birth probabilities. Finally this study indicated that fertility is a purposive behavior that is based on intentions applied into the life course and changed when unexpected developments occur.

Marriage Choices in North Carolina and Virginia, 1969-71 and 1979-81.

This study investigates age race and educational patterns of marriage choice in North Carolina and Virginia during 1969-71 and 1979-81 and provides substantial support for exchange theories of marriage behavior. While like marrying like is most common a female emphasis on male economic characteristics and a male emphasis on female noneconomic characteristics lead to significant patterns of exchange....The major change between 1969-71 and 1979-81 is a decline in the level of marriage but the increasing economic role of women is associated with a reduction in the extent to which women marry men with more education. The marriage exchange thus reflects less inequality between the sexes as it becomes less common. (EXCERPT)

Partner Choice in Marriages and Cohabitations.

This paper examines the extent to which cohabitation resembles marriage by comparing patterns of partner choice in the formation of married and cohabiting couples....On the assumption that cohabitations are not informal marriages but relationships formed by a looser bond we use exchange theory to predict differences in partner choice. Since cohabitations are less permanent than marriages we hypothesize that choices of a cohabitation partner give greater weight than choices of a marriage partner to achieved characteristics (such as education) which can reflect a short-term ability to contribute to the relationship. In turn we expect that choices of a cohabitation partner give less weight to ascribed characteristics (such as age race and religion) that reflect long-term considerations. That study hypothesis is tested using propensities to marry and to cohabit calculated from the [U.S.] National Survey of Families and Households. (EXCERPT)

The effect of attitudes and economic activity on marriage.

We use individual-level prospective data from Waves I and II of the [U.S.] National Survey of Families and Households to examine whether attitudes are responsible for sex and race differences in marriage rates net of economic opportunity. We find that persons expressing positive attitudes about marriage are significantly more likely to marry and favorable assessments of marriage accentuate the positive effects of economic attributes on marriage odds. However structural not cultural differences account for the large racial differences in marriage rates. This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America. (EXCERPT)

Women's Employment, Marital Happiness, and Divorce

The relationship between womens employment and the risk of divorce is both complex and controversial. The role specialization (or interdependence) view of marriage argues that the gains to marriage for both partners decrease when both are in the labor force, and hence womens employment destabilizes marriage. In contrast, the economic opportunity hypothesis asserts that female labor force participation does not intrinsically weaken marriage, but gives women resources that they can use to leave unsatisfactory marriages. Here we use data from the two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to conduct the first large-scale empirical test of those conflicting claims. Our results provide clear evidence that, at the individual level, womens employment does not destabilize happy marriages but increases the risk of disruption in unhappy marriages.

Measuring the tightness of a marriage squeeze

The “marriage squeeze,” or the effect on marriage of an imbalance between the numbers of males and females, has been seen as having a great influence on contemporary marriage behavior. Nonetheless, the literature does not contain a clear definition of exactly what a marriage squeeze is and contains few quantitative estimates of its impact on marriage. The present article provides a precise definition of the marriage squeeze in equation (2), and applies it to measure both artificially produced marriage squeezes in two-sex nuptiality stable populations and the experience of the United States during the period 1950–1990. The marriage squeeze is shown to be capable of producing significant changes in both the level and distribution of marriage, and it appears to be having such an impact in some contemporary Third World societies. For developed

CONSTRUCTING INCREMENT-DECREMENT LIFE TABLES

A life table model which can recognize increments (or entrants) as well as decrements has proven to be of considerable value in the analysis of marital status patterns, labor force participation patterns, and other areas of substantive interest. Nonetheless, relatively little work has been done on the methodology of increment-decrement (or combined) life tables. The present paper reviews the general, recursive solution of Schoen and Nelson (1974), develops explicit solutions for three cases of particular interest, and compares alternative approaches to the construction of increment-decrement tables.

First unions and the stability of first marriages.

The National Survey of Families and Households is used to examine the relationship between premarital cohabitation and marital instability among U.S. women born between 1928 and 1957. As previously observed cohabitation is generally associated with higher risks of marital dissolution. However that differential is much smaller (or reversed) in recent cohorts where cohabitation is more common. The association between cohabitation and marital dissolution observed in earlier cohorts may reflect the select nature of those who cohabited and may largely disappear as cohabitation becomes more common. (EXCERPT)

Family Transitions In Young Adulthood

Using the first (1995) and third (2001–2002) waves of the Add Health survey, we examine women’s family transitions up to age 24. Only a third of all women marry, and a fifth of those marriages dissolve before age 24. Three out of eight women have a first birth, with a substantial majority of those births outside of marriage: 66% for whites, 96% for blacks, and 72% for Mexican Americans. Cohabitation is the predominant union form; 59% of women cohabit at least once by age 24. Most cohabitations are short lived, with approximately one in five resulting in a marriage. We summarize the family and relationship experience of women up to age 24 in terms of four categories, each accounting for roughly a quarter of all women. Category 1 has the women who remain single nonparents. Category 2 has the early marriers, women whose marriage is not preceded by a first birth. Category 3 has those who become single parents. Category 4 has the women who cohabit at least once, but who do not marry or have a birth by age 24. The strictly ordered transitions of the 1950s are long gone and have been replaced by a variety of paths to adulthood.

The harmonic mean as the basis of a realistic two-sex marriage model

The “two-sex problem” is one of attempting to preserve the essential character of male and female rates of marriage (or birth), since the expression of those rates is influenced both by the age-sex composition of the population and the underlying age-sex schedule of preferences. The present paper focuses on marriage and advances a theoretically based, realistic, and conceptually simple solution. In the continuous case, where exact male and female ages are used, equation (11) provides a mathematical relationship which equates the sum of the male and female marriage propensities of the observed population with that of the model. When discrete age intervals are used, the two-sex consistency condition is given by equation (14) which equates observed and model population rates calculated using the harmonic means of the number of persons in the relevant male and female age groups. The harmonic mean consistency condition is shown to be fully sensitive to the competitive nature of the “marriage market.” When compared with alternative approaches to the two-sex problem in the context of data for Sweden, 1961–64, the simple harmonic mean method yields results fairly similar to those of the other methods. None of the two-sex methods do particularly well at predicting the actual distribution of marriages, however. The likely reason is that the underlying marriage preferences changed, a circumstance which emphasizes the importance of carefully conceptualizing how observed behavior can be decomposed into the effects produced by age-sex composition and those produced by the underlying preferences.