ࡗ Just How Do I Love Thee?: Marital Relations in Urban ChinaMarriage quality is much studied, but mostly in the West. This study applies such research to a large, representative sample of couples from urban China using a multidimensional measure of marriage quality. Characteristics unique to Chinese families-the importance of parental approval of mates and the importance of marriage typecontinue to exert a strong influence on the pattern of marriage quality. However, results also support Western feminist arguments that egalitarian behaviors-division of chores and decision making-and attitudes strongly impact marriage quality, but in sometimes unique ways for each gender. As in the West, children are associated with lower marriage quality, partly through increasing domestic inequality, but only in certain types of marriages.Marriage is one of the most intense human relationships. The quality of this relationship is continually redefined by spouses and is potentially crucial to their overall experience of family life. Although a substantial literature on marriage quality exists, most research focuses on Western families, with less understanding of other societies. Can a common set of assumptions about the marital relationship be applied to different societies? This paper expands the existing marriage quality

This article analyzes gender attitudes and behaviors of husbands and wives across three urban Chinese cohorts. Whilewomen remain egalitarian in gender ideology across cohorts, the percentage of men who hold egalitarian gender attitudes declines significantly across cohorts. At the same time, the division of household labor has become somewhat less inequitable for women; however, their expectations of equality appear to have changed faster than the division of labor. Men's attitudes reflect a backlash to egalitarian pressures from their wives and the state, with significantly negative implications for their partner's marriage quality.

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We model histories between two cohorts of urban Chinese couples (N = 1,191) of a rarely studied living arrangement—coresidence with the wife's parents—using a dynamic life history analysis in contrast to previous cross‐sectional studies of coresidence. We examine patterns of entry into and exit from coresidence with the wife's parents, comparing the predictive power of modernization theory to the effect of demographic change and the resources and needs of each generation. Given China's well‐known patrilineal family system, we find a surprisingly high number of couples ever residing nonnormatively, and significant differences between cohorts in what determines the pattern of coresidence. Resources and needs that reflect conscious choices to coreside most strongly influence nonnormative coresidence. Its importance may increase as the children of the One‐Child Family Policy grow up and marry.

"This article revises the Coale-Trussell method for analyzing data from the World Fertility Survey by proposing and testing alternative log-linear and log-multiplicative models. The models, in one form or another, represent the structural constraint underlying the Coale-Trussell method on the variation in the age pattern of human fertility. With a Poisson distribution assumption for the number of births, several parameters of the models are simultaneously estimated via maximum likelihood. It is shown that the new approach can be adopted whenever fertility limitation is compared across multiple populations or subpopulations."