An ongoing question remains for family researchers: Why does a positive association between cohabitation and marital dissolution exist when one of the primary reasons to cohabit is to test relationship compatibility? Drawing on recently collected data from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth, the authors examined whether premarital…

This study examines the ways in which Japanese corporate transnationalism affects husbands' involvement in family life and marital relationships primarily from a perspective of wives. It is based on interviews with 22 Japanese wives and 4 husbands. Studies of Japanese corporate transnationalism treat men as mere supervisors to local workers or…

American families and workplaces have both changed dramatically over the past half-century. Paid work by women has increased sharply, as has family instability. Education-related inequality in work hours and income has grown. These changes, says Suzanne Bianchi, pose differing work-life issues for parents at different points along the income…

Driven by theory and extant research on the communication of emotions within the family, the current investigation examined marital quality and parents' emotional expressiveness as determinants of coparenting in a sample of 57 couples with young children. Specifically, mothers' and fathers' expressiveness was examined as moderators of the…

It is apparent that many adults do not want the job of parenthood, yet they are socially pressured to have children. (MM)

The "nonzero sum" noncooperative Prisoner's Dilemma game was used to study marital conflict. Among the results were that: (1) personality characteristics were more predictive of conflict behavior for wives while person perception characteristics were more predictive for husbands; and (2) both sexes tended to exhibit conflict behavior. (Author)

Research indicates that economic dependency in women and emotional dependency in men independently contribute to domestic-partner abuse risk and that high levels of emotional dependency in an abused partner may reduce the likelihood that the victimized person will terminate the relationship. An analysis of psychological factors and social forces…

This paper is a preliminary statement about morning and night people. The authors collected and analyzed married student responses to open-ended questions concerning "morningness" and "nightness" as factors influencing individual, marital, and family adjustment. This issue has both theoretical and practical significance for marriage and the…

Differentials in separation and divorce among blacks are compared to those among whites. Differences in marital instability depend heavily on the variables included for study. The paper concludes with a methodological analysis of alternative definitions of instability with a focus on the measurement of black white differences. (EH)

This study deals with the relationship between number and spacing of children and family role structure as measured by decision making and household task performance. Data on childbearing patterns and family role structure indicate that family size, spacing between marriage and first birth, and spacing between first and last birth are all related…

Increasingly, appeals to the divorce statistic are employed to substantiate claims that the family is in a state of breakdown and marriage is passe. This article contains a consideration of reasons why the divorce statistics are invalid and/or unreliable as indicators of the present state of marriage and family. (Author)

Analyzes data on the marital stability of young parents from the 1972 National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. Reports that the birth of the first child strengthens the short-run stability of marriages: disruption rates of 5 to 8 percent were lower than estimated rates had the child not been born. (KH)

There are four prominent common law defenses to a divorce suit. They are condonation, recrimination, collusion, and connivance. The defense of condonation should be abolished because it obstructs reconciliation. (Author/BY)

Findings suggest that unhappy marriage is a disability, analogous to minority race, economic deprivation or physical illness. (Author)

New findings from research, leading to new insights, have in the past ten years revealed that effective couple communication is a vital key to effective marital interaction. Some of these insights are listed and described, and the new concepts which have emerged are discussed. (Author)