This article discusses the effects of cohabitation and marriage on binge drinking, cigarette smoking and marijuana use in the U.S. The authors argue that marriage causes reductions in risky behaviors like binge drinking and marijuana use (especially for men), but has little effect on smoking. Less consistent are the effects of cohabitation on risky behaviors. […]
Drawing on a national longitudinal study of 297 parents and their married offspring, the authors found that parents’ marital discord was negatively related to offspring’s marital harmony and positively related to offspring’s marital discord. The transmission of marital quality was not mediated by parental divorce, life-course variables, socioeconomic attainment, retrospective measures of parent-child relationships, or […]
The Welfare Peer TA Network sponsored a multi-State TA event on July 15-16, 2003, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This event was co-coordinated with Public Strategies, the public relations firm that manages the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. The Administration for Children and Families’ Region VI, VII and IX Offices provided additional support, ensuring this event met State […]
Partners in romantic relationships provided reports on perceived changes in their love, commitment, and satisfaction and completed contemporaneous scales on the same relationship phenomena multiple times over several years. At each wave of the longitudinal study, participants whose relationships had remained intact perceived that their love and related phenomena had increased since they had last […]
The divorce revolution–the steady displacement of a marriage culture by a culture of divorce and unwed parenthood–has failed. It has created terrible hardships for children, incurred unsupportable social costs, and failed to deliver on its promise of greater adult happiness. The time has come to shift the focus of national attention from divorce to marriage […]
This research project was conducted as part of the evaluation for the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. In 1999 Governor Frank Keating announced the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, with the objective of reducing the divorce rate in Oklahoma by 1/3 by the year 2010. One aim of the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative is to change the culture of support […]
The impact of welfare policies on discouraging or encouraging marriage has long been a topic of discussion. Welfare programs, by providing single parents with the economic means to support their children, are thought to discourage marriage by their nature. The negative economic effects of single motherhood are well-known. In 2000, the poverty rate for children […]
This National Survey is one of the first major studies on the strengths of marriage versus the exclusive focus on problems. Using a sample of 21,501 married couples (both husbands and wives) from all 50 states, this survey used a comprehensive marital assessment tool called ENRICH which focuses on 20 significant areas and contains 195 […]
This lecture explores why marriage is important and necessary for the well-being of the participants and of society. It discusses marriage as a countercultural institution, the selflessness of marriage, how recent federal court rulings regarding the right to privacy threaten to further undermine marriage, and how marriage promotes the common good by building families and […]
Examined several protective mechanisms that may reduce deleterious correlates of marital conflict and marital dissolution in young children. One set of potential buffers focused on parent-child interaction: parental warmth, parental scaffolding/praise, and inhibition of parental rejection. As a second set of potential buffers, each parent was interviewed about their “”meta-emotion philosophy””–that is, their feelings about […]