Transitions From Sexual Relationships Into Cohabitation and Beyond

The Effects of the 2021 Child Tax Credit on Housing Affordability and the Living Arrangements of Families With Low Incomes

Access to safe and stable housing is important for child and adult well-being. Yet many low-income households face severe challenges in maintaining stable housing. In this article, we examine the impact of the 2021 temporary expansion to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) on housing affordability and the living arrangements of families with low incomes. We employ a parameterized difference-in-differences method and leverage national data from a sample of parents who are receiving or recently received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (N = ∼20,500), many of whom became newly eligible for the CTC. We find that the monthly CTC reduced parents' past-due rent/mortgages (both amounts and incidence) and their reports of potential moves due to difficulties affording rent/mortgages. The CTC increased the likelihood that parents reported a change in their living arrangements and reduced their household size, both effects driven by fewer mothers living with a partner (and not a reduction in doubling up). We find some differences in effects by race and ethnicity and earnings. Our findings illustrate that the monthly credit improved low-income parents' ability to afford housing, gain residential independence from partners, and reduce the number of people residing in their household.

Non-family Living Arrangements Among Young Adults in the United States

The share of young adults living in married-couple family households in the USA has declined in recent decades. Research on alternative living arrangements focuses on cohabitation among unmarried couples and parent-adult child coresidence. Less is known about trends in non-family living arrangements and the characteristics of young adults living with non-relatives. This study documents trends over time in non-family living arrangements among young adults in the USA and examines the sociodemographic profile of those living with non-relatives. Using pooled US Census and American Community Survey microdata from 1990 to 2019, the authors document age patterns in non-family living arrangements over time and use logistic regression to estimate the likelihood of living with non-family based on individual-level characteristics. Results indicate that non-family living among young adults has increased over time, and that the arrangement is associated with markers of both advantage and disadvantage. Differences across age groups explain some of these mixed results. Trends among younger groups are linked to socioeconomic patterns around family formation. Among older groups, the demographic and labor force characteristics of the foreign born and constraints of their kin availability may be driving trends. The exploratory analysis provides relevant evidence around an increasingly common living arrangement in the USA and also identifies several areas for future research on living arrangements among young adults and the implications of these trends.

What Explains Socioeconomic Disparities in Early Pregnancy Rates?

In this study, we integrate diverse structural, social psychological, and relational perspectives to develop and test a comprehensive framework of the processes that make early pregnancy a socially stratified phenomenon. Drawing on rich panel data collected among a sample of 940 18- to 20-year-old women from a county in Michigan, we estimate nested hazard models and formal mediation analyses to simultaneously elucidate the extent to which different mechanisms explain disparities in early pregnancy rates across maternal education levels-a key indicator of socioeconomic status. Together, our distal mechanisms explain 53 and 31 percent of the difference in pregnancy rates between young women whose mothers graduated college and young women whose mothers graduated and did not graduate high school, respectively. Reproductive desires, norms, and attitudes, relationship contexts, and educational opportunities and environment each link maternal education to young women's odds of pregnancy. Self-efficacy, however, plays only a modest role; while contraceptive affordability and knowledge are not significant pathways. These findings bring into focus the most prominent intervening mechanisms through which socioeconomic circumstances shape young women's likelihood of becoming pregnant during the transition to adulthood.

Mental health benefits of cohabitation and marriage: A longitudinal analysis of Norwegian register data

The aim is to examine how mental health is affected by cohabitation and marriage. Individual fixed-effects models are estimated from Norwegian register data containing information about consultations with a general practitioner because of mental health conditions in 2006-19. Mental health, as indicated by annual number of consultations, improves over several years before cohabitation. For those marrying their cohabiting partner, there is a weak further reduction in consultations until the wedding, but no decline afterwards. In other words, formalization of the union does not seem to confer additional mental health benefits. However, marriage may be considered a marker of favourable earlier development in mental health. In contrast, there is further improvement after direct marriage, as well as stronger improvement over the years just preceding direct marriage. Patterns are quite similar for women and men. Overall, the results suggest that the mental health benefits of cohabitation and marriage are similar.Supplementary material for this article is available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2022.2063933. Note: numbers in brackets refer to supplementary notes that can be found at the end of the supplementary material.

Couple Formation is Prolonged not Postponed. New Paths to Union Formation in Contemporary France

In France, as in other European countries, the age at first cohabiting union has risen over the past decades, as a result of longer school enrolment, structural economic changes, and new family norms. While the median age at first co-resident couple was 23.8 for men born in France in the beginning of the 1950s, it was 26.0 among the generation born in the beginning of the 1970s. This tendency is often referred to as a postponement of couple formation and as a part of a broader delay in the transition to adulthood. This article argues, on the contrary, that couple formation has not been postponed but prolonged. In fact, age at first couple formation has remained stable across generations born since the mid-twentieth century in France. Starting from there, we take on a biographical approach to examine the nature, duration, and articulation of the successive stages that make up young people's conjugal trajectories in France. What are the different pathways into couple life, and how have these changed over time? In order to answer these questions, we use optimal matching methods to identify ideal typical trajectories and then logistic regressions in order to see how these relate to generational differences as well as sociodemographic characteristics. We observe three traditional, three timeless and five new paths to couple life. The main historical change is the increasingly gradual nature of union formation, a trend that reflects a dual pattern. First, unions are progressively institutionalized: the time laps between different relationship stages, such as "going out," "settling in," and eventually marrying, have expanded. Second, young people increasingly experience several relationships during youth: the different steps of couple formation are taken with different partners. We conclude that couple formation is not delayed per se; it is rather the material and institutional formalization of unions that is put off for the future. We discuss the scientific and methodological implications of this finding.

Women's Divergent Union Transitions After Marital Dissolution in the United States

In the United States, high marital instability calls for more research on union transitions after marital dissolution. Previous studies focus on remarriage and pay little attention to rising post-dissolution cohabitation. In this study, I apply marital search theory to examine the level, pace, and differentials of repartnering (remarriage or cohabitation vs. staying single) and the exit from cohabitation (remarriage or dissolution vs. staying cohabiting). Adopting union history data from the pooled National Survey of Family Growth (2011-2017), I track union transitions among a sample of N = 2129 women. Analyses based on life tables and discrete-time event history analyses reveal important findings. First, most women repartner after marital dissolution. Compared to remarriage, cohabitation occurs more frequently and shows a quicker pace. Second, post-dissolution cohabitation is short-lived, and its transition to remarriage is more common than to dissolution. Third, these union transitions differ by demographic and socioeconomic predictors, including age, race and ethnicity, and education. Overall, I reveal that post-dissolution union transition is a divergent and unequal process, and I further discuss the implications on theory and family inequality.

Gender, union formation, and assortative mating among older women

This paper presents a search-theoretic model of union formation among women, aged 55 and older. Specifically, it provides new estimates of gender differentials in cohabitation and marriage at older ages, and documents recent patterns of assortative mating using data from the 2008-2017 American Community Survey. Our analyses reveal that cohabitation represents a much smaller share of all older unmarried women, all partnered women, and all women in comparison to patterns observed among their male counterparts. The results also reveal highly uneven patterns of union formation by age, race and marital history, which reflect demographically uneven constraints and preferences. Our analyses also document, for the first time, patterns of assortative mating at older ages. Shortages of similarly-aged men, especially among older African American women, seemingly heighten the likelihood of demographically mismatched unions. Older women are less likely to form unions with same-race or economically attractive partners, defined as men having a college-degree. This study shows that older single women, in general, are at a comparative disadvantage in the marriage market, both in forming co-residential unions and in finding partners who match their own social, demographic, and economic profiles. This paper highlights considerable heterogeneity in the experiences of America's older women. It calls for new theoretical approaches that acknowledge the unequal resources and bargaining power among older women in the marriage market.

Cohabitation dissolution and psychological distress among young adults: The role of parenthood and gender

Cohabitation has become a normative experience for American young adults and a common setting for childbearing in recent decades. However, the high dissolution rate of cohabitation exposes young adults to the potential stress of intimate relationship dissolution and single parenthood during early adulthood. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we apply growth curve models to analyze how cohabitation dissolution associates with trajectories of depressive symptoms and binge drinking behaviors for young adults (aged 17 to 35). We investigate how the presence of children moderates this association for men and women. We find that cohabitation dissolution is associated with increased depressive symptoms for both men and women. However, cohabitation dissolution is only positively associated with binge drinking behaviors for men, and a significant gender difference is observed. The presence of children when cohabitation dissolves strengthens the positive association between cohabitation dissolution and depressive symptoms among women, and this positive moderation fades away as young women age. These findings suggest that gender differences in the association of cohabitation dissolution with psychological distress are contingent on the types of psychological distress under consideration and also reveal that cohabitation dissolution intertwined with non-marital parenthood is harmful to mental health, especially for young women.

Sexual and reproductive health knowledge, sexual attitudes, and sexual behaviour of university students: Findings of a Beijing-Based Survey in 2010-2011

BACKGROUND

Although several studies have attempted investigating sex-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices among young people in China, deeper insights were still needed to further understand how this population could be supported to make healthy and safe sexual choices. Against this background, this study used a large set of secondary data to examine associations among sexual and reproductive health (SRH) knowledge, sexual attitudes, and sexual behaviour.

METHODS

A cross-sectional study was employed to explore the associations among SRH knowledge, sexual attitudes, and sexual behaviour with a publicly available survey data among the 1196 university students from freshmen to Ph.D. candidates. Descriptive analysis was used to describe the sociodemographic characteristics of the university students by gender. Associations of sociodemographic factors with sources and categories of SRH knowledge, categories of contraceptive knowledge, sexual attitudes, and sexual behavior were explored with Poisson regressions and logistic regressions, respectively. The mediating effects of sociodemographic factors on the associations between SRH knowledge and sexual behavior, observed sexual attitudes on the associations of SRH knowledge with sexual behavior, and latent sexual attitudes on the relationship between SRH knowledge and sexual behavior were analyzed in order.

RESULTS

Descriptive analysis showed that the sample was dominated by age group (18 to 24 years), undergraduates, females, limited contraceptive knowledge, unfavorable sexual attitudes, and insufficient knowledge sources. Regression analyses showed that sociodemographic factors had significant associations with SRH knowledge, sexual attitudes, and sexual behavior. Subsequently, the mediating effects of sociodemographic factors on the associations of SRH knowledge and sexual attitudes with sexual behavior were confirmed. Controlling for sociodemographic factors, the effects of sexual attitudes on the associations between SRH knowledge and sexual behaviour could be verified. Structural equation modeling indicated that the linear sequence of sources and categories of SRH knowledge → sexual attitudes → sexual behaviour model and the triangle mediating effects of sexual behaviour → sexual attitudes → SRH knowledge model existed.

CONCLUSIONS

Sociodemographic factors and observed sexual attitudes mediated the associations between SRH knowledge and sexual behaviour. The sequence relationship: sources and categories of SRH knowledge → sexual attitudes → sexual behavior and the mediating relationship: sexual behavior → sexual attitude → sources and categories of SRH knowledge & sexual behavior → sources and categories of SRH knowledge and sexual behavior → sexual attitude → categories of contraceptive knowledge & sexual behavior → categories of contraceptive knowledge were confirmed in the sample. This study also identified an urgent need for the university students to access to SRH comprehensive knowledge.

Socio-Economic Differences in the Prevalence of Single Motherhood in North America and Europe

The study focuses on understanding the association between parental socio-economic status (SES) and the likelihood of women experiencing a first birth while single, and identifying societal factors that influence this association in 18 North American and European societies. Previous research has shown that single motherhood occurs disproportionately among those from with lower a lower parental SES. The study assesses whether this is caused by parental SES differences in the risk of single women experiencing a first conception leading to a live birth or by parental SES differences in how likely women are to enter a union during pregnancy. Additionally, an assessment is made of whether cross-national differences in these associations can be explained by a country's access to family planning, norms regarding family formation, and economic inequality. Across countries, a negative gradient of parental SES was found on the likelihood of single women to experience a first pregnancy. The negative gradient was stronger in countries with better access to family planning. In some countries, the negative gradient of parental SES was aggravated during pregnancy because women from lower parental SES were less likely to enter a union. This was mostly found in societies with less conservative norms regarding marriage. The results suggest that certain developments in Western societies may increase socio-economic differentials in family demography.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-021-09591-3.

Racial Pairings and Fertility: Do Interracial Couples Have Fewer Children?

OBJECTIVE

Our overall goal is largely descriptive-to compare recent fertility patterns between racially endogamous and exogamous couples in the United States. Evidence of lower fertility among exogamous or interracial couples arguably provides indirect evidence of social distance and cultural and economic integration.

BACKGROUND

The growth of interracial marriage and cohabitation has fueled the rise in biracial or mixed-race children. Fertility rates are uneven among racial and ethnic groups, seemingly rooted in stigma and cultural differences (e.g., fertility norms). Whether fertility is different among interracial couples is unclear: Fertility rates that largely conform to the population of racially endogamous White couples provide evidence of social integration whereas differential fertility may reveal gender dynamics in fertility decision-making, including power relationships that depend on the race of male and female partners.

METHOD

We pool data from the 2008 to 2017 American Community Survey to compare past-year fertility patterns among endogamously and interracially married and cohabiting couples.

RESULTS

Fertility is generally lower among racially exogamous than endogamous unions, especially among Asian American-White couples. Fertility among American Indian-White couples is much closer to patterns of White couples than of American Indian couples. Fertility among other interracial couples nevertheless varies by the race of male partners. That is, fertility of the Black male/White female and the Hispanic male/White female couples is similar to patterns found among endogamous Black and Hispanic couples, respectively. The White male/Black female and the White male/Hispanic female couples follow the fertility patterns of White couples.

CONCLUSION

In general, the fertility levels of interracial couples are intermediate between those of endogamous White couples and their endogamous Black, Hispanic, or American Indian counterparts, but vary significantly by the race-gender mix of partners.

Socioeconomic Status and Intimate Relationships

The ways that couples form and manage their intimate relationships at higher and lower levels of socioeconomic status (SES) have been diverging steadily over the past several decades. At higher SES levels, couples postpone marriage and childbirth to invest in education and careers, but they eventually marry at high rates and have relatively low risk for divorce. At lower SES levels, couples are more likely to cohabit and give birth prior to marriage and less likely to marry at all. This review examines how SES comes to be associated with the formation, development, and dissolution of intimate relationships. Overall, research has highlighted how a couple's socioeconomic context facilitates some choices and constrains others, resulting in different capacities for relationship maintenance and different adaptive mating strategies for more and less advantaged couples. A generalizable relationship science requires research that acknowledges these differences and one that recruits, describes, and attends to socioeconomic diversity across couples.

Marriage and Union Formation in the United States: Recent Trends Across Racial Groups and Economic Backgrounds

Family formation in the United States has changed dramatically: marriage has become less common, nonmarital cohabitation has become more common, and racial and economic inequalities in these experiences have increased. We provide insights into recent U.S. trends by presenting cohort estimates for people born between 1970 and 1997, who began forming unions between 1985 and 2015. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, we find that typical ages at marriage and union formation increased faster across these recent cohorts than across cohorts born between 1940 and 1969. As fewer people married at young ages, more cohabited, but the substitution was incomplete. We project steep declines in the probability of ever marrying, declines that are larger among Black people than White people. We provide novel information on the intergenerational nature of family inequalities by measuring parental income, wealth, education, and occupational prestige. Marriage declines are particularly steep among people from low-income backgrounds. Black people are overrepresented in this low-income group because of discrimination and opportunity denial. However, marriage declines are larger among Black people than White people across parental incomes. Further, most racial differences in marriage occur among people from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Family inequalities increasingly reflect both economic inequalities and broader racial inequalities generated by racist structures; in turn, family inequalities may prolong these other inequalities across generations.

Young Adulthood Relationships in an Era of Uncertainty: A Case for Cohabitation

The young adulthood years are demographically dense. Dr. Ronald Rindfuss made this claim when he was Population Association of America (PAA) president in 1991 (Rindfuss 1991), and this conclusion holds today. I offer both an update of his work by including Millennials and a new view on young adulthood by focusing on an increasingly common experience: cohabitation. I believe we need to move away from our marriage-centric lens of young adulthood and embrace the complexity that cohabitation offers. The cohabitation boom is continuing with no evidence of a slowdown. Young adults are experiencing complex relationship biographies, and social science research is struggling to keep pace. Increasingly, there is a decoupling of cohabitation and marriage, suggesting new ways of framing our understanding of relationships in young adulthood. As a field, we can do better to ensure that our theories, methods, and data collections better reflect the new relationship reality faced by young adults.

The Demography of Families: A Review of Patterns and Change

The authors review demographic trends and research on families in the United States, with a special focus on the past decade. They consider the following several topics: (a) marriage and remarriage, (b) divorce, (c) cohabitation, (d) fertility, (e) same-gender unions, (f) immigrant families, and (g) children's living arrangements. Throughout, the authors review both overall trends and patterns as well as those by social class and race-ethnicity. The authors discuss major strands of recent research, emphasizing emerging themes and promising directions. They close with a summary of central patterns and trends and conclude that recent trends are not as uniform as they tended to be in earlier decades, making the description of family change increasingly complex.

Family structure patterns from childhood through adolescence and the timing of cohabitation among diverse groups of young adult women and men

Family structure changes experienced by children are likely to shape their transitions into young adulthood, including the formation of their own romantic relationships. This study examined links between children's family structure trajectories from childhood through adolescence and their timing of entry into cohabitation as young adults, a transition with implications for future relationship instability through adulthood. Repeated measures latent class analysis identified configurations of family structures and family structure changes from birth through age 15 among 10,706 young people in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Children and Young Adults. A Cox proportional hazard model then used the resulting classes to predict timing into cohabitation over the period from age 15 to age 38. Both timing of family structure transitions and the type of transitions (e.g., early transitioning into a stepfamily home) were associated with earlier entry into cohabitation. Notably, links between family structure trajectories and the timing of cohabitation differed by gender and race/ethnicity (Latinx, African American, White), such as a faster entry into cohabitation by women who experienced early entry into stepfamily structures. Regardless of gender, Latinx and White young adults were faster to enter into cohabitation if they lived in a stepfamily structure during early childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cohabitation and Marital Expectations among Single Millennials in the U.S

Cohabitation has surpassed marriage as the most common union experience in young adulthood. We capitalize on a new opportunity to examine both marital and cohabitation expectations among young single women in recently collected, nationally representative data (National Survey of Family Growth 2011-2015) (n=1,467). In the U.S. there appears to be a 'stalled' Second Demographic Transition as single young adult (ages 18-24) women have stronger expectations to marry than cohabit and the vast majority expects to, or has, already married. Among young women expecting to marry, the majority (68%) expect to cohabit with their future spouse but about one-third expect to follow a traditional relationship pathway into marriage (to marry without cohabiting first). In addition, women from disadvantaged backgrounds report the lowest expectations to marry, but there is no education gradient in expectations to cohabit. Marriage expectations follow a "diverging destinies" pattern, which stresses a growing educational divide, but this is not the case for cohabitation expectations. Our results, based on recently collected data, provide insight into the contemporary context of union formation decision-making for the millennial generation.

Comparing same- and different-sex relationship dynamics: Experiences of young adults in Taiwan

BACKGROUND

Few studies of same-sex relationships are able to capture the dynamics of these relationships from formation to dissolution, and even fewer provide evidence on these dynamics in a non-Western context.

OBJECTIVE

Using retrospective relationship history data collected from a nationally representative sample of young adults, this study compares the processes of forming and terminating relationships between same- and different-sex couples in Taiwan, an Asian society featuring both strong parental influences on children's mate selection and an ongoing legislative effort to legalize same-sex marriage.

RESULTS

Results from event-history models show that factors associated with relationship formation and dissolution are largely similar for same- and different-sex unions and that same-sex relationships do not have higher dissolution rates. Nevertheless, premarital coresidence with parents, which is likely to amplify parental influences on children's mate selection, deters the entry into and accelerates the dissolution of same-sex relationships more than it does different-sex relationships. Moreover, same-sex relationships are more heterogamous in family economic background, but more homogamous in age and education level, than different-sex ones.

CONTRIBUTION

This study is among the first to provide evidence on the dynamics of same- and different-sex relationships in a non-Western context. Aside from a few differences between same- and different-sex relationships related to parental influences, our study provides strong evidence that same- and different-sex couples experience intimacies in similar ways-even in a relatively conservative cultural context like Taiwan.