Journal ArticleDOI
Marriage as a Public Issue
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The United States is now engaged in a wide-ranging debate about the place of marriage in contemporary society, with a focus on family life and divorce.Abstract:
Summary Over the past fifty years, powerful cultural and social forces have made marriage less central to Americans’ family lives. In reaction, the United States is now engaged in a wide-ranging debate about the place of marriage in contemporary society. In this article, Steven Nock examines the national marriage debate. He begins by reviewing the social and demographic trends that have changed the role of marriage and the family: the weakening link between marriage and parenthood caused by the contraceptive revolution, the declining significance of marriage as an organizing principle of adult life, and the increasingly accepted view that marriage and parenthood are private matters, relevant only to the individuals directly involved. He then considers the abundant scientific evidence on the positive consequences of marriage for both the economic well-being and the health of American adults. He notes that based partly on the evidence that marriage is good for adults and children, numerous public and private groups, including religious activists, therapeutic professionals, family practitioners, educators, and federal and state government officials, have initiated programs to strengthen marriage, lower divorce rates, reduce out-of-wedlock births, and encourage responsible fatherhood. He then reviews some of those programs. Nock observes that although large cultural and social forces are driving the decline in marriage, most of the new programs attempting to restore or strengthen marriage in the United States focus on changing individuals, not their culture or society. He argues that the problem cannot be addressed solely at the individual level and cautions that given how little researchers and professionals know about how to help couples get or stay married, expectations of policies in these areas should be modest. But despite the shortage of effective strategies to promote marriage, he notes, a political, cultural, and scientific consensus appears to be emerging that the best arrangement for children is to live in a family with two loving parents. He believes that the contemporary marriage debate is an acknowledgment of the cultural nature of the problem, and views it as a crucial national conversation among Americans struggling to interpret and make sense of the place of marriage and family in today’s society.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Cohabitation and children's living arrangements: New estimates from the United States
Sheela Kennedy,Larry L. Bumpass +1 more
TL;DR: This paper uses the 1995 and 2002 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth to examine recent trends in cohabitation in the United States and finds increases in both the prevalence and duration of unmarried co-habitation.
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A Treatise on the Family
TL;DR: The Enlarged Edition as mentioned in this paper provides an overview of the evolution of the family and the state Bibliography Index. But it does not discuss the relationship between fertility and the division of labor in families.
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Social relationships and health.
TL;DR: Experimental and quasi-experimental studies suggest that social isolation is a major risk factor for mortality from widely varying causes and the mechanisms through which social relationships affect health remain to be explored.
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Suicide: A Study in Sociology
TL;DR: The suicide is one of the least understandable of human behaviours as discussed by the authors, and suicide makes an immense contribution to our understanding to what must surely be the most understandable of acts in human life.
Journal Article
A Treatise on the Family
TL;DR: A Treatise on the Family by G. S. Becker as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics.
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