It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and…

Secondary respondent data are underutilized because researchers avoid using these data in the presence of substantial missing data. The authors reviewed, evaluated, and tested solutions to this problem. Five strategies of dealing with missing partner data were reviewed: (a) complete case analysis, (b) inverse probability weighting, (c) correction…

Using Current Population Survey data for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2001 (N=73,001), we document change in the prevalence of couples where (a) the wife contributes less than 40% of the family income, (b) income contributions are relatively equal, and (c) the wife's income contribution surpasses her husband's contribution. In 1970, close to 90% of…

This article delineates and assesses the evidence for four perspectives that have guided previous research on the relationship between wives economic resources and marital stability. Hypotheses from these perspectives were tested using event history methods and 1980-1997 panel data for 1,704 individuals from the Marital Instability Over the Life…

Increasingly, children are living with cohabiting parents. Prior work on the material well-being of children living in cohabiting families is extended by including the biological relationship of children to adults, examining the racial and ethnic variations, and investigating the multiple indicators of material well-being. We draw on the 1999…