Sociology
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Item Rethinking marriage metabolism: The declining frequency of marital events in the United States(Population Research and Policy Review, 2023) Cohen, Philip N.Previous research has used the concept of marriage metabolism to represent churning in the marriage system, but the measurements used to date have been inadequate. This paper addresses changes in the incidence of marital events in the United States from 2008 to 2021. I offer a measure, the Total Rate of Marital Events (TRME), of the projected lifetime experience of marital transitions (marriage, divorce, and widowhood) for life table cohorts. I find that the TRME declined steeply over this relatively short period: 22% for men and 19% for women. All three components declined in every age group below 90. The decline in divorce was most pronounced. More accurately than the term "retreat from marriage," I describe the slowing churn of the marriage system as reflecting the diminished social presence of marriage in daily life. Rather than a retreat, this coincides with the increasingly selective status of married life. A higher status marriage system is a smaller, slower, and more stable marriage system.Item Growing Uncertainty in Marriage Expectations among U.S. Youth(Socius, 2024-03-26) Cohen, Philip N.; Pepin, Joanna R.Marriage rates are falling in the United States. The authors ask whether today's young adults are likely to continue this trend. Using Monitoring the Future Public-Use Cross-Sectional Datasets (1976-2022), this visualization presents U.S. 12th graders' marriage expectations. It shows declining optimism that they will be "very good" spouses and declining expectations that they will eventually marry. Both trends are prominent in the last 10 years of the survey, and both are more dramatic among young women than among young men. If these trends hold, it may foretell further declines in marriage rates in the coming years.Item The Coming Divorce Decline(Socius, 2019-08-28) Cohen, Philip N.This article analyzes U.S. divorce trends over the past decade and considers their implications for future divorce rates. Modeling women’s odds of divorce from 2008 to 2017 using marital events data from the American Community Survey, I find falling divorce rates with or without adjustment for demographic covariates. Age-specific divorce rates show that the trend is driven by younger women, which is consistent with longer term trends showing uniquely high divorce rates among people born in the Baby Boom period. Finally, I analyze the characteristics of newly married women and estimate the trend in their likelihood of divorcing based on the divorce models. The results show falling divorce risks for more recent marriages. The accumulated evidence thus points toward continued decline in divorce rates. The United States is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer and more stable than it was in the past.Item Maternal Age and Infant Mortality for White, Black, and Mexican Mothers in the United States(Society for Sociological Science, 2016) Cohen, Philip N.This paper assesses the pattern of infant mortality by maternal age for white, black, and Mexican mothers using the 2013 Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Public Use File from the Centers for Disease Control. The results are consistent with the “weathering” hypothesis, which suggests that white women benefit from delayed childbearing while for black women early childbearing is adaptive because of deteriorating health status through the childbearing years. For white women, the risk (adjusted for covariates) of infant death is U-shaped—lowest in the early thirties—while for black women the risk increases linearly with age. Mexican-origin women show a J-shape, with highest risk at the oldest ages. The results underscore the need for understanding the relationship between maternal age and infant mortality in the context of unequal health experiences across race/ethnic groups in the US.Item Parental Age and Cognitive Disability among Children in the United States(The Society for Sociological Science, 2014-04) Cohen, Philip N.Some risks of having children at older ages are widely documented, and the “biological clock” is a popular media concern, but the association between cognitive disability generally and both mothers’ and fathers’ age is not well known. This article assesses descriptively the relationship between children’s cognitive disability and parents’ age at birth, using a sample of 353,119 children aged five to eleven living with two married parents from the 2009-2011 American Community Survey. Cognitive disability varied by parental age categories from 1.8 percent to 5.4 percent, with overall rates of 2.2 percent. Odds of disability were much more strongly associated with mothers’ age at birth than with fathers’ age at birth, with the highest odds for children whose mothers were age 45 or higher at the time of their birth (adjusted odds ratio 2.7 relative to age 30 to 34) and the lowest for those born to mothers in their early 30s. These results demonstrate that the risk is strongly associated with the mother’s age at birth—but not the father’s. This is consistent with previous research showing that it is the mother’s health, rather than age per se, that is most important for the health of their children.