Showing papers by "Linda J. Waite published in 1993"

A joint model of marital childbearing and marital disruption

Abstract: Married couples with children appear to be less likely to end their marriages than childless couples, especially when the children are young. Although this suggests that children affect the chances that their parents will divorce, the process may not be so simple: the chances that the marriage will last also may affect couples' willingness to make the commitment to the marriage implied by having children. This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to test the hypothesis that the risk of disruption faced by a married woman affects the chances that she will conceive and bear a child. The model used takes into account the simultaneous relationships between marital dissolution and marital fertility by including the hazard of disruption as a predictor of timing and likelihood of marital conception, and by including the results of previous fertility decisions as predictors of disruption of the marriage. We find that the hazard of disruption has strong negative effects on the hazard of marital childbearing, lengthening the intervals between births and decreasing the chances that a child will be born. This effect appears to be strongest for women who have had at least one child, either before or during the current marriage, although it is also large for childless women. Explicitly including the hazard of disruption in models of marital childbearing has sizable and important effects on many predictors of fertility.

Are Blacks More Likely Than Whites To Receive and Provide Social Support in Middle and Old Age? Yes, No, and Maybe So

Abstract: Differences in the social support transactions of White and Black adults were investigated using data from the 1987/88 National Survey of Families and Households. Multivariate models were estimated to identify differences between Whites and Blacks in the likelihood that they provided and received instrumental and emotional support. Most importantly, we examined, separately for men and women, variations in Black-White differences from mid-life to old age. Results indicated that, overall, Blacks were no more likely than Whites to provide and receive both types of social support. In fact, Black women were less likely than White women to provide instrumental support to others. However, in old age, Black women were more likely to receive instrumental support and about as likely as White women to provide such support. These findings suggest that when comparing the informal support activities of White and Black adults, race needs to be considered in the context of gender and stage of life.

Attitudes, Values, and the Entrance Into Cohabitational Unions

Abstract: Although people who are currently cohabiting differ from the married and single across a wide range of political religious and social attitudes the authors know little about the extent to which preexisting attitudes and values may have affected their decision to cohabit The research presented here examines the effect of values and attitudes measured prior to union formation on choice of cohabitation vs marriage for first coresidential union The authors findings show strong support for the argument that values and attitude play a causal role in the formation of unions; people who choose to cohabit were significantly different prior to their decision to cohabit both from people who married and from people who stayed single These preexisting differences appear along a variety of attitude and value dimensions including the importance of marriage and family the value of career success and stable employment and the importance of money and leisure time for ones own pursuits Cohabitors also differ in their sex-role attitudes and participation in religious organizations The effect of many of these attitudes on the propensity to cohabit differs for men and women But both men and women who appear to reject the constraints and demands of traditional gender roles within marriage are more likely than others to choose an informal union which may carry fewer demands for sex-typical or sex-traditional behavior than does marriage Not only does cohabitation seem to offer an alternative to marriage as a tentative nonlegal form of a coresidential union but more broadly its attitudinal antecedents seem to favor a different style of life in general (authors)

Pre-Marital Cohabitation and Subsequent Marital Dissolution: Is It Self-Selection?

Abstract: The timing and manner in which families are formed and dissolved in the United States has changed dramatically in the later part of this century. Concurrent with increases in the age at first marriage the age at which individuals begin childbearing and the rate at which marriages end there has been a dramatic increase in the rate at which individuals choose to enter a non-marital union - cohabitation. This form of living arrangement has increasingly become an antecedent to marriage. A number of studies have found that married couples who began their relationship by cohabiting in a marriage-like relationship have a higher risk of marital dissolution. An important unresolved question is whether this relationship is due to self-selection of more dissolution-prone individuals into cohabitation before marriage. In this paper we explicitly address the issue of the endogeneity of cohabitation before marriage in its effects on the hazard of marriage dissolution. To address this problem we use newly developed econometric methods that permit the estimation of related simultaneous hazard processes and qualitative outcomes. The empirical analysis includes individual and time-varying covariates controls for multiple forms of duration dependence and crucial for the simultaneous estimation controls for unobserved heterogeneity. The endogeneity of one outcome on another is controlled for by allowing the unobserved heterogeneity components to be correlated across the various decisions that are modeled. These methods are applied to data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. We find significant heterogeneity in both behavioral processes and evidence of self-selection into cohabitation. (authors)