This paper draws on three waves of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, and qualitative data collected for a subset of parents in the survey, to examine how low-income, unmarried parents’ likelihood of divorce affects whether or not they marry after having a child together. We examine hypotheses generated from a qualitative […]

This report describes how 18 states and 26 counties within those states responded to the family policy provisions of the 1996 welfare law. The report also offers explanations for why state and local efforts to move clients from welfare to work were greater than efforts to promote marriage and prevent nonmarital births; why abstinence-based efforts to achieve lower rates of teen pregnancy […]

This report focuses on the role that religion is playing in the marriage movement, the ways in which public policy is promoting marriage, as well as church-state cooperation on behalf of marriage, and the likelihood that these public policies will meet with success. This report also focuses on an important ancillary issue. Since the nation’s […]

Marriage has become a major component of the TANF reauthorization debates, as proposals in the Senate, House, and White House have allocated significant resources to marriage promotion activities and related research. Although there is an existing body of research on marriage from fields such as psychology, demography, and child development, research on marriage policy is […]

A special essay on young, not-yet married men’s attitudes on the timing of marriage finds that men experience few social pressures to marry, gain many of the benefits of marriage by cohabiting with a romantic partner, and are ever more reluctant to commit to marriage in their early adult years. Available evidence on marriage trends […]

This article addresses cultural adaptation of Western-Palestinian intermarried couples. Using in-depth interviews, information was gathered from 16 participants, 7 Western women and 9 Palestinian men, living in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Adaptation strategies are typified by the extent to which each spouse embraces the partner’s culture. The data suggest that intermarriage engenders a […]

Policies designed to promote and strengthen marriage are gaining currency at all levels of government, and a key goal of many of these initiatives is to reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing. By focusing exclusively on nonmarital births, however, these efforts ignore that married people also face considerable difficulties planning their families. Given the large numbers of married […]

Marriages are most fragile in the early years with 20 percent of divorces occurring in the first 5 years of marriage. Money is one of the topics couples fight about most often during these years, and it is also a contributing factor in many divorces. Debt brought into marriage is an especially troublesome part of […]