For many people, shacking up is one way to find out if you and your partner can co-exist in a shared space and have a relationship that will last a lifetime. The question is, why?
Patrick Ishizuka, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Population Center, explored the topic through an economic lens in his study. Meet the Expert. Patrick Ishizuka received his Ph. He is currently an assistant sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on work, family, and social inequality. To understand how cohabitation influences relationships, money, and work, Ishizuka looked at data gathered from thousands of households between the years — Among his sample, slightly more than half of couples who lived together and experienced some kind of relationship transition ended up breaking it off: 1, couples dissolved, while 1, went on to get married.
In fact, the odds of moving on to marriage declined by 28 percent between to National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Twenty-five Years of Change in Cohabitation in the U. S, - Patrick Ishizuka. Their new paper is quite complex statistically, but their insight boils down to two things easily explained.
First, they believe studies that suggested that the premarital cohabitation effect has disappeared simply did not have outcomes for divorce far enough out for those who had married in the recent cohorts that they examined. Second, they show that premarital cohabitation is associated with a lower risk for divorce, but only very early in marriage in the first year ; in contrast, the finding flips, with premarital cohabitation being associated with higher risks for divorce in years after that first year.
In particular, Rosenfeld and Roesler suggest that those who live together before marriage have an advantage in the first year because they are already used to all the changes that come with living together. Figure 2 shows that, for the years in which the NSFG has substantial numbers of marriages and breakups, there was no apparent trend over time in the raw or adjusted odds ratios of breakup for premarital cohabitation.
Given the enormous changes over time in the prevalence of premarital cohabitation see Figure 1 , Figure 2 shows a surprising stability in the association between premarital cohabitation and marital dissolution over time.
There are three dominant theories of causality in how living together before marriage could be associated with worse outcomes on average in marriage—explaining why the finding is just not what most people expect it should be. Rosenfeld and Roesler address the first two but did not say anything about the third. This theory is simply that there are many factors associated with who cohabits when and why, and with whom, and that those factors are also associated with how marriages will turn out regardless of cohabiting experience.
Other factors are religiousness, traditionality, and family history parental divorce, etc. The selection explanation is that those who cohabit in riskier ways e. There is a lot of evidence for selection playing an important role in this literature, and scholars in this area note this and address it in various ways.
The Experience of Cohabiting Changes Things. In an older line of research that was brilliant but badly needs updating, Axinn and Barber showed that cohabiting changes attitudes about marriage and divorce, lowering esteem for marriage and increasing acceptance of divorce.
This is consistent with scores of studies in psychology that show that attitudes will cohere to behavior. Earlier, Thornton, Axinn, and Hill showed that cohabiting led to people becoming less religious. Rosenfeld and Roesler include a lot on the theory of experience, but mostly use it to emphasize the short-term benefit of already experiencing living together when transitioning into marriage. Yet, whatever else is true, there is very scant evidence to support this belief in a positive effect. We have argued since the early s for another causal theory in this line of research.
Drawing on theories of commitment, we suggested that what nearly everyone misses in understanding the risk associated with cohabitation is pretty simple: moving in together makes it harder to break up, net of everything else. The added risk is due to how cohabitation substantially increases constraints to remain together prior to a dedication to a future together maturing between two partners.
Two key papers on this perspective are here and here. One primary prediction from the inertia hypothesis is that those who only started living together after being already committed to marriage e. The inertia hypothesis completely embraces selection, suggesting that relationships already at greater risk become harder to exit because of cohabitation. Various predictions from the inertia hypothesis have been supported in ten or more studies , seven of which include tests of the prediction about pre-cohabitation levels of commitment to marriage aka plans for marriage prior to living together —and this latter finding exists in at least six different samples across a range of outcomes.
There is no particular reason to expect that the inertia risk will dissipate with increased acceptance of cohabitation because the mechanism is about the timing of the development of aspects of commitment, not about societal views and personal attitudes.
For living together to lower risk in marriage, the benefit of learning something disqualifying about a partner has to exceed the costs of making it harder to break up that comes with sharing a single address. Hence, inertia is another possibility along with experience that could explain the persistence of a cohabitation effect, such as found by Rosenfeld and Roesler. Other Possibilities. Other factors that may be associated with differential outcomes include pacing Sassler et al.
All such theories of moderated outcomes suggest that the risks of living together before marriage are greater for some groups than others. Rosenfeld and Roesler are not really addressing this issue. However, they did find that the risks associated with premarital cohabitation were lower for African Americans. For most groups, cohabitation is no particular indicator of higher commitment. However, it may well signal higher levels of commitment among groups where marriage has declined a great deal, like African Americans.
Rosenfeld and Roesler also note that the risks of living together before marriage were even greater among those who had lived with more than just their mate prior to marriage. Other factors related to experience may take over from there, such as how cohabitation can increase acceptance of divorce.
The articles illuminate the complexities of cohabitation and the challenges of studying the effects in social science. I refer you to that article for more background information. First, they argue that their statistical models include multiple and confounding measures of time. Second, they emphasize the important decisions one has to make about truncation based on age when using the National Survey of Family Growth NSFG , upon which all of the studies suggesting the association has disappeared are based.
Here is a sample of that complexity:. Another age truncation issue is that relatively long marriages cannot be observed with these data without bias toward those that occurred at young ages.
For example, a year marriage can only be observed for women who married at age 29 or younger. This is the basis for their assertion that it is best to limit the analytic sample for this research to marriages of 10 or fewer years duration.
In essence, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg argue that Rosenfeld and Roesler made a number of decisions about the sample and statistical modeling that are inconsistent with the prior literature and therefore not sound. They present further analyses in their response and stand by their claim that the cohabitation effect has disappeared. Rosenfeld and Roesler respond that Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg misinterpreted how time-related variables had been handled in their original study, noting that the authors of the critique could have asked for clarification instead of building arguments around false assumptions.
This is primarily the result of that decision to limit the analytic sample to marriages of 10 years or less duration. Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg contend that this is standard, best practice when using the NSFG, while Rosenfeld and Roesler argue the decision unnecessarily limits sample and statistical power, causing a data-based bias in favor of finding that there is no longer a divorce risk associated with premarital cohabitation.
Their reply also makes clear just how methodologically important their prior finding is showing that premarital cohabitation is associated with lower odds of divorce in the first year of marriage but greater odds thereafter.
Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg attempted to replicate that finding and did not obtain it but using options they prefer, not the same set up as Rosenfeld and Roesler. Rosenfeld and Roesler point out that their critique actually does display evidence of this finding, but that the effect was not statistically significant because of the smaller sample.
In practice, that is not an unusual decision, but Rosenfeld and Roesler believe that this decision, along with the decision to restrict the sample based on duration of marriages, leads to analyses less likely to find the increased risk for divorce.
Filtering out the couples who have been married longer as MSK do enhances the Recent Cohort Fallacy because in the very early stages of marriages, premarital cohabitation reduces the risk of marital breakups. Rosenfeld and Roesler also assert that Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg do not adequately account for the timing of children.
They explain that cohabiters are much more likely than non-cohabiters to already have children at the time of marriage, and this difference has nearly doubled over the decades. Thus, cohabiting couples who married in later cohorts were quite a bit more likely than those marrying earlier to already have a child when they married, and the extra stability from having children that is changing by cohort is another factor that lowers the apparent cohort-based association between cohabitation and divorce.
Rosenfeld and Roesler stand by their conclusion that the average increased risk for divorce associated with premarital cohabitation is mostly unchanged over the last 40 years. Otherwise, not so much. As ever on this subject, questions abound. Are marital outcomes truly worse for those who live together before marriage, and, if so, for whom?
For example, it is less clear that things work the same way, on average, for African Americans who cohabit, and economic disadvantage is deeply embedded in how cohabitation relates to risk in marriage. One of the most intriguing questions remains: why is there any association with risk? As Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg note, the long-accepted conclusion in sociology is that differences in marital outcomes based on premarital cohabitation are due to selection—that the added risk is really about who cohabits and who does not.
Selection is surely a large part of the story. Of course, on top of that, they argue the risk is no longer evident. Rosenfeld and Roesler disagree. Although there are strong arguments on each side, I believe Rosenfeld and Roesler get the better of the debate.
They make a compelling case for their analytic decisions and findings. Further, they clearly describe how the choices affect the findings theirs, and that of others. The argument that the overall cohabitation effect will disappear has not been compelling to me, although I have no trouble accepting the possibility. There are two explanations for how the experience of cohabitation might increase risks for some couples, net of selection: changes in attitudes 5 and inertia.
0コメント