Partner Choice and the Differential Retreat From Marriage

Abstract

The contemporary retreat from marriage in the United States has had a differential impact across socioeconomic and racial groups. Here, 1990 marriage rates and propensities for Virginia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin are analyzed regarding (a) the likelihood that persons in different groups ever marry and (b) patterns of partner choice with respect to race and educational level. Marriage remains strong in most race‐education groups but is substantially lower among Blacks and among those with less than 12 years of education. Patterns of partner choice have shifted to show greater symmetry between the educational levels of brides and grooms. Changes have been modest with regard to the level and pattern of interracial (Black‐White) marriage. Marriage is increasingly a union of equals, but a union chosen more by Whites than by Blacks and more by the well educated than by the poorly educated.

Changing partner choice and marriage propensities by education in post-industrial Taiwan, 2000-2010

“…Considerable empirical evidence over the past decades has proven Oppenheimer"s theory to be more satisfactory in explaining the reality that college-educated women, though marrying later, are in fact more likely to enter a marital union than their less-educated peers in several developed societies (Goldstein and Kenney 2001;Heard 2011;Ono 2003;Qian and Preston 1993;Santow and Bracher 1994;Schoen and Cheng 2006;Schwartz and Mare 2005;Sweeney 2002). For instance, using the 1995 Current Population Survey, Goldstein and Kenney (2001) show that for women born in the 1950s and 1960s, college graduates were more likely to marry than their less-educated counterparts, even though they tended to enter marriage later.…”

“…This approach has been applied to several studies on marriage patterns (Okun 2001;Qian 1998;Qian and Preston 1993;Raymo and Iwasawa 2005;Schoen and Cheng 2006;Schoen and Wooldredge 1989). The merit of this method is that it can simultaneously consider the joint availability of unmarried men and women of specific traits, e.g., age and education, to facilitate comparison of marriage behaviors between groups that are free of compositional distortion.…”

Unequal marriage markets: Sex ratios and first marriage among Black and White women

“…The increase in cohabitation, the baby boomers aging out of the typical age range of first marriages, a delay in timing of first marriages, and the increasing proportion of people who will never marry all are linked to the declining rates of marriage (Amato 2004;Brotherson and Duncan 2004;Lee and Payne 2010;McLanahan and Jacobsen 2015;Sassler and Miller 2017;Schoen and Cheng 2006). Although some scholars attributed marital decline to a rise in women's education and employment opportunities, since Oppenheimer (1997), this theory has receded.…”

Research on Students' Performance in Higher Education through Sequence Analysis

“…Blacks are also found to marry less and more often have children outside of wed-lock compared to other racial groups (Loomis & Landale, 1994;Manning & Smock, 1995;Schoen & Cheng, 2006) and as mentioned above marriage is associated with many positive outcomes.…”