A peek inside the black box: What marriage means for poor unmarried parents

Abstract

Key Words: cohabitation, disadvantage, family formation, marriage, meaning, norms. Marriage is down, cohabitation is up, and the divorce rate remains high in the United States. Further, in 1950, only 1 in 20 births was to an unmarried woman, whereas today, more than a third of American children are born outside marriage. The number of gay and lesbian couples raising children together is also on the rise. These important demographic changes are evident in Canada, the United Kingdom, and in much of Western Europe as well. Each author in this print symposium documents the extent of these massive transformations in family life and speculates about what they mean for the future of marriage. The virtues of the articles in this issue far outweigh their shortcomings. Each demonstrates a commanding knowledge of the data on the magnitude of family changes and how they are arrayed across societies-and, in some cases, for various subgroups within societies. We see three ways in which scholars could build on these articles to expand our scientific understanding of these important trends. First, documenting changes in cohabitation and marriage for whole societies, though vital, often masks the substantial variations within societies by race/ethnicity and immigration status, social class, or other factors such as region or sexual orientation. Two articles in this volume focus on large and important variations in cohabitation and marriage by subgroups within the United States and Canada, and are a vivid testimony to the importance of studying subgroup differences. We advocate for more work in this vein, especially in the neglected area of social class. Differences by socioeconomic status in childbearing, cohabitation, and marriage behavior are often large, even controlling for characteristics such as race/ethnicity (Ellwood & Jencks, 2001). Second, researchers should pay more attention to parental status and how it affects attitudes and behaviors with regard to cohabitation and marriage. Third, following Max Weber (1949), we believe that human behavior cannot be fully understood unless social scientists understand the meanings that humans ascribe to their actions. Following Oropesa and Landale (2004), we advocate for qualitative research that allows us to peek inside the 'black box' in order to identify the content of culture (p. 914). The purpose of our article is fourfold. First, we want to explore the meanings of childbearing, cohabitation, and marriage for a specific subgroup in U.S. society-low-income residents of large cities-and to speculate about the role that these meanings may play in influencing the behaviors we observe. Second, we focus on unmarried parents who share children, and we look at how parental status plays a unique role in shaping views and actions with regard to cohabitation and marriage. Third, we aim to show, by example, how vital it is to understand the meanings that these men and women ascribe to their actions. Finally, as do the other authors in this volume, we speculate about what our findings may mean for the future of marriage. BACKGROUND Though nonmarital childbearing, nonmarriage, cohabitation, and divorce have increased in nearly all segments of American society, all are still most common in the low-income population and members of some disadvantaged minority groups. In Huston and Melz's (2004) words, among these groups, it would appear that the strings that pull people into marriage and bind them together have lost much of their fiber (p. 947). In fact, America's least advantaged citizens, nonmarital childbearing has become the rule (Ventura & Bachrach, 2000), and marriage just might eventually become the exception (Lichter & Graefe, 2001). This fact has led some to charge that America's poorest and most disadvantaged citizens have abandoned the institution of marriage altogether. Recently, though, a new longitudinal survey of nonmarital births has provided evidence that seems to counter these claims. …