Re-Examining the Link Between Premarital Sex and Divorce.

Premarital sex predicts divorce, but we do not know why. Scholars have attributed the relationship to factors such as differences in beliefs and values, but these explanations have not been tested. It is further unclear how this relationship changes by number of sexual partners, or differs by gender. We re-examine this relationship with event history models using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Models include measures of adolescent beliefs and values, religious background, and personal characteristics, as well as approximate number of premarital sexual partners in young adulthood. We find the relationship between premarital sex and divorce is highly significant and robust even when accounting for early-life factors. Compared to people with no premarital partners other than eventual spouses, those with nine or more partners exhibit the highest divorce risk, followed by those with one to eight partners. There is no evidence of gender differences.

Does a longer sexual resume affect marriage rates?

Sociologists have proposed numerous theories for declining marriage rates in the United States, often highlighting demographic, economic, and cultural factors. One controversial theory contends that having multiple non-marital sex partners reduces traditional incentives for men to get married and simultaneously undermines their prospects in the marriage market. For women, multiple partners purportedly reduces their desirability as spouses by evoking a gendered double-standard about promiscuity. Though previous studies have shown that having multiple premarital sex partners is negatively associated with marital quality and stability, to date no research has examined whether having multiple non-marital sex partners affects marriage rates. Data from four waves of the National Survey of Family Growth reveal that American women who report more sex partners are less likely to get married by the time of the survey (though so too were virgins). Yet this finding is potentially misleading given the retrospective and cross-sectional nature of the data. Seventeen waves of prospective data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1997 mixed-gender cohort that extend through 2015 show the association between non-marital sex partners and marriage rates is temporary: recent sex partners predict lower odds of marriage, but not lifetime non-marital sex partners. Seemingly unrelated bivariate probit models suggest the short-term association likely reflects a causal effect. Our findings ultimately cast doubt on recent scholarship that has implicated the ready availability of casual sex in the retreat from marriage. Rather, the effect of multiple sex partners on marriage rates is "seasonal" for most Americans.

Broken boundaries or broken marriages? Racial intermarriage and divorce in the United States.

OBJECTIVE: Several recent studies have investigated the consequences of racial intermarriage for marital stability. None of these studies properly control for first-order racial differences in divorce risk, therefore failing to appropriately identify the effect of intermarriage. Our article builds on an earlier generation of studies to develop a model that appropriately identifies the consequences of crossing racial boundaries in matrimony. METHODS: We analyze the 1995 and 2002 National Survey of Family Growth using a parametric event-history model called a sickle model. To appropriately identify the effect of interracial marriage we use the interaction of wife's race and husband's race. RESULTS: We find elevated divorce rates for Latino/white intermarriages but not for black/white intermarriages. Seventy-two percent of endogamous Latino marriages remain intact at 15 years, but only 58 percent of Latino husband/white wife and 64 percent of white husband/Latina wife marriages are still intact. CONCLUSIONS: We have identified an important deficiency in previous studies and provide a straightforward resolution. Although higher rates of Latino/white intermarriage may indicate more porous group boundaries, the greater instability of these marriages suggests that these boundaries remain resilient.

Joint physical custody and neighborhood friendships in middle childhood.

Almost half of first marriages end in divorce, which in turn may produce joint physical custody arrangements. Seen by many states to be in the best interest of the child, joint physical custody is increasingly common. Yet much is unknown about its consequences for children. This article considers how joint physical custody arrangements affect children's neighborhood friendships, an important component of child well-being because of their contributions to social and cognitive development. Thirteen parents and 17 children (aged 5­11) in 10 families, selected via convenience and snowball sampling, participated in semistructured interviews. The findings suggest that joint physical custody arrangements do not imperil children's neighborhood friendships; indeed, most children and parents interviewed voiced contentment in this area.

More evidence for trends in the intergenerational transmission of divorce: a completed cohort approach using data from the general social survey.

Many studies have demonstrated that the children of divorce are disproportionately likely to end their own marriages. In previous work, I showed that the transmission of divorce between generations weakened substantially for General Social Survey (GSS) respondents interviewed between 1973 and 1996 (Wolfinger 1999); Li and Wu (2006, 2008) contended that my finding is a methodological artifact of the GSS's lack of marriage duration data. This article presents a completed-cohort approach to studying divorce using the GSS. The results confirm a decline in the probability of divorce transmission that cannot be explained by the right-censoring bias alleged by Li and Wu. This finding contributes to an ongoing debate about trends in the negative consequences of parental divorce, as well as demonstrating a useful approach to right-censored phenomena when event history data are not available.

Living and loving "decent": religion and relationship quality among urban parents.

Religious participation is linked to overall satisfaction among both married and unmarried couples in urban America. Less is known about what may account for the association between religious participation and relationship quality. We explore this issue using data from the first two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Relationship-related behaviors (e.g., temperance) and relationship-specific behaviors (e.g., affection) can each account for the association between church attendance and relationship quality. Furthermore, religious participation appears to be more tightly linked to men's perceptions of relationship quality than women's.

Double impact: what sibling data can tell us about the long-term negative effects of parental divorce.

Most prior research on the adverse consequences of parental divorce has analyzed only one child per family. As a result, it is not known whether the same divorce affects siblings differently. We address this issue by analyzing paired sibling data from the 1994 General Social Survey (GSS) and 1994 Survey of American Families (SAF). Both seemingly unrelated regressions and random effects models are used to study the effect of family background on offspring's educational attainment and marital stability. Parental divorce adversely affects the educational attainment and the probability of divorce of both children within a sibship; in other words, siblings tend to experience the same divorce the same way. However, family structure of origin only accounts for a trivial portion of the shared variance in offspring's educational attainment and marital stability, so parental divorce is only one of many factors determining how offspring fare. These findings were unchanged when controlling for a number of differences both between and within sibships. Also, the negative effects of parental divorce largely do not vary according to respondent characteristics.