Citings and Sightings

Al and Tipper Gore recently decided that 40 years is enough.   Are there broader social implications of this story for other long term couples?  The Monterey County Herald called upon the expertise of sociologists to answer this question.

It makes us frightened for our parents, our friends, ourselves. “[The Gores] were seen as this perfect couple, that’s why we’re traumatized,” says Terri Orbuch, a marriage therapist and sociology professor at the University of Michigan.

“This is supposed to be one of the easiest and happiest periods of marriage … the reward for a job well done,” says Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociology professor who studies families.

But the other fact is that we’ve never before faced empty-nest periods that could easily extend for 20 or 30 years. “The institution of marriage wasn’t designed for that. It was designed to help us raise kids and put food on the table,” says Cherlin. “It may just be that it’s a difficult task for married couples to keep a happy life going for decades.”

“It’s more threatening to us if we see a couple who we thought were happy just drift apart,” Cherlin says. “If even well-behaved people get divorced after 40 years, then some of us will worry about what our own marriages will be like later in life.”

How do you keep the flame going after 40 years?

To really work, long-term relationships need “regular attention, regular affirmation on a daily basis,” says Orbuch, who recently completed a 20-year study of marriage for the National Institutes of Health. She wonders whether Al Gore was gone too much — out saving the world — to save his marriage. (Then again, maybe it was Tipper who was inattentive?)

Telegraph UK recently reported on the growth of a nontraditional relationship form in Britain: the LAT (living-apart-together) relationship.

Gillian Sheffer and Daniel Fisher have been in a relationship for three years. They are fully committed to one another – and are extremely happy to be together – but they have absolutely no desire to live together. Instead, they choose to reside in separate homes.

“Living apart offers the best bits of marriage without the boring parts,” says Gillian, a 49 year-old self-employed osteopath who lives in Golder’s Green, north London. Daniel, a 52-year-old teacher, lives at his own home in nearby Bounds Green. Both have children from previous relationships sharing their homes.

How common are LAT relationships?

According to a report in last month’s issue of the Sociological Review, an estimated one in 10 adults are now in committed, non-cohabiting relationships.

What do these relationships look like and who tends to be a LAT-er?

“LATs can have both an intimate couples relationship and retain their own autonomy,” says Simon Duncan, professor of social policy at the University of Bradford, who co-authored the Sociological Review paper with Miranda Phillips, research director at the National Centre for Social Research. “There isn’t an average LAT, though they tend to be better educated than the majority and somewhat more liberal. Different interpretations in the past have suggested they are either radicals or, alternatively, uncommitted, cautious people. The answer, in my view, is probably both.”

LATs can be young or old and, according to Duncan and Phillips, fall into three main categories. One group don’t see themselves as couples in the long-term sense; the second are in commuter marriages, separated by work; the third group, whose members tend to be older, choose this type of relationship because it suits their emotional and practical needs. “Often this group will have other commitments, like children or elderly parents, and value their own space, or have a cherished home they don’t want to leave,” Duncan explains.

And to quench your thirst for additional sociological commentary: 

Sasha Roseneil, professor of sociology and social theory at Birkbeck University, believes that with rates of marriage at an all-time low, more of us are exploring non-traditional ways of being together.

“They desire an autonomous life,” she says. “People in LAT relationships may wish to invest more in friendships and feel that their sexual relationship is not the most important relationship in their life.”

Avoiding the entrapment of domestic drudgery is another reason for not wanting to share a roof. “Many women have said to me that the only way they could be together with their partner is if they didn’t have to deal with his mess,” she says.

Women who have kids tend to earn less than women who don’t, a phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty.” But USA Today reports that  that when a woman has children makes a difference.

Researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park and the University of California at Los Angeles reviewed 35 years of data from some 2,200 women born between 1944 and 1954, and found that women who had kids in the early- to mid-20s or even younger didn’t fare as well economically as those who delayed.

Sociologist Joan Kahn, one of the study’s authors, comments:

“Women who delay childbearing end up as successful economically as women who didn’t have children, and we look at it basically throughout their adult years — well into their 50s,” she says.

The point, she says, is that women who are younger when they have kids and attempt to get back into the workforce later may not have that up-front investment in education and training, which those who have kids later benefit from. They earned equivalent wages and had higher status occupations just like women who were childless.

Agriculture Online reports results from the Farm and Rural Life Poll, an annual survey of Iowa farmers conducted by Extension Sociology at Iowa State University.

The latest [survey] indicates concerns are growing surrounding the passage of farms to the next generation. In the 2008 poll, 42% of farmers responding said they were planning on retiring in the next 5 years, and among those, 56% said they had identified a successor, according to J. Gordon Arbuckle, Jr., leader of a team of ISU Extension sociologists administering the poll.

The survey explores what the farmers think motivates their children to take on the family farm:

“The 735 farmers who were over 55 — approaching retirement age — had 350 children who farmed, a proportion (48%) that represents less than half of the number that will be needed to replace the current generation of farmers as they retire,” he adds.

Of those saying the younger generation planned to take the reins of the farm, reasons like quality of life and love of farming topped the list of motivations.

“Following in importance were quality of life considerations and having grown up wanting to farm. Seventy-two percent of farmers rated these factors as having been important or very important criteria in their children’s decisions to farm,” Arbuckle says. “Ability to be their own boss (68%), desire to stay close to home (56%), desire to carry on family tradition (55%), and family ability to help get them started (55%) were also rated as important or very important by a majority of Farm Poll participants.”

Why are members of the next generation planning on other careers instead of returning to the farm? Arbuckle says income opportunities elsewhere comprised the top motivator, while industry entrance hurdles like input costs, high land rents and excessive overall financial risk topped the list of drivers toward other careers.

“In contrast to the factors influencing the decision to farm, most of the reasons that were rated as most important in the choice of a non-farm career were economic,” Arbuckle says.

“On the whole, results suggest that for those individuals who chose farming as their career, cultural and lifestyle factors were the predominant reasons underlying that choice. Whether regarding their own decisions to farm, or their children”s decisions, love of farming and quality of life issues were fundamental,” he continues. “On the other hand, for those children who did not choose to farm, parents’ assessments clearly point to economic factors as the most important decision criteria, whether in the form of economic barriers to farm entry or better income opportunities elsewhere.”

Check out the site for “The Farm Poll” for great summary reports of surveys dating back to 1982.

God is really popular in the U.S., reports the Vancouver Sun:

He gets more Oscar shout-outs than Meryl Streep, is name-checked by every other American Idol contestant and is presumed to have a vested interest in who wins hockey games.

This finding is based on a study by University of Toronto sociologist Scott Schieman:

The vast majority of Americans believe God is directly concerned with their personal affairs, with most assuming a divine reason for everything from job promotions to speeding tickets.

“In American culture — much less so in Canada — there’s a really constant flow of God-talk that references these small, personal interactions. It’s almost like a self-absorbed view of divine will,” says study author Scott Schieman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.

“The extent that it’s so visible, almost saturating the culture at times, makes me think it’s not just metaphor or symbolism; many, many people believe these processes are real.”

Eight in 10 Americans say they depend on God for decision-making guidance.  Seven in 10 believe that when good or bad things happen, the occurrences are part of God’s plan.  And six in 10 believe God has set the course of their lives.

This might have drawbacks in the realm of personal efficacy, says Schieman:

Schieman find[s] that a third of Americans agree with the rather defeatist statement: “There’s no sense in planning a lot because ultimately my fate is in God’s hands….If you feel like, ‘No matter what I do, it’s all going to work out a particular way,’ what does that do for your motivation?” says Schieman, who suggests the 32 per cent of people who behave this way do so because it relieves anxiety in desperate circumstances, shifting the pressure skyward.

In contrast:

Schieman says the idea of God as “a personal friend” can lend itself to positive effects, such as fostering an increased sense of social support, well-being and purpose.

To read more about Schieman’s study, you can also check him out the New York Times.

Currently, heterosexual couples who live together before marriage and those who don’t have about the same chance of marital success, reports USA Today:

The report, by the National Center for Health Statistics, is based on the National Survey of Family Growth, a sample of almost 13,000. It provides the most detailed data on cohabitation of men and women to date.

Past research — using decades-old data — found significantly higher divorce rates for cohabitors, defined as “not married but living together with a partner of the opposite sex.” But now, in an era when about two-thirds of couples who marry live together first, a different picture is emerging in which there are few differences between those who cohabit and those who don’t.

Sociologists weigh in on the findings:

Sociologist Pamela Smock of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor considers the data definitive. “On the basis of these numbers, there is not a negative effect of cohabitation on marriages, plain and simple,” she says.

Paul Amato, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, says the new data suggest that “maybe the effect of premarital cohabitation is becoming less of a problem than it was in the past. If it becomes normative now, maybe it’s not such a big deal.”

However, according to the study’s co-author, Bill Mosher:

“There’s a real difference in the types of cohabitations out there.  We can show that now with these national data.”

The data show that those who live together after making plans to marry or getting engaged have about the same chances of divorcing as couples who never cohabited before marriage. But those who move in together before making any clear decision to marry appear to have an increased risk of divorce.

Additionally:

Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, says the report may quell fears of cohabitation “as a long-term substitute for marriage,” as in some European countries.  “American cohabitors either marry or break up in a few years,” he says.

MSNBC also joined the fray this week in reporting on cohabitation.  Check it out here for more fabulous sociological commentary on shacking up.

The Herald-Sun picked up on forthcoming research about the popularity of internet dating:

“We estimate that about 18 percent — almost 1 in 5 — of those who are single and have access to the Internet have used Internet dating,” said Rebecca Tippett, a doctoral student at Duke and one of the three authors of “The Social Demography of Internet Dating in the United States.”

Analyzing a national survey of 3,215 adults, the sociologists discuss what contributes to this phenomenon:

Some of those factors are demographic, she [Tippett] said, “like the rising age of first marriage, the increased divorce rate and the fact that people are geographically more mobile.”

In years past, you’d go to school, then get a permanent job and live in that same town, “and that’s where’d you find a mate,” Tippett said. “But people are moving more now, they’re not getting married at 22 and they are removed from their traditional social networks for mate selection. When those things are changing, it’s more common for the way to find a partner to change as well.”

The paper also attributed part of what it called “phenomenal growth” to social change that has made Internet dating “more acceptable [especially for women].”

Finding a partner through intermediaries, of course, isn’t new, Tippett pointed out, but “technology has made it much easier.”

“For most people, what Internet dating has done is make more information available,” she said. “You can see a picture, you can e-mail, you can instant message. You’re able to interact and pre-screen.”

But,

[The researchers] also pointed out that the growth is uneven, and that a digital divide still exists, hypothesizing that “Internet daters will be disproportionally white, possess high education and income, and live in urban/suburban areas.”

This week, the Christian Century reviewed sociologist Christian Smith’s new book on religion and spirituality in “emerging adulthood”:

Souls in Transition, the impressive second installment of findings—and the first longitudinal sounding—from the massive National Study of Youth and Religion, is about [18- to 23-year-olds], the most religiously disengaged cohort in the U.S. Principal investigator Christian Smith, assisted by Patricia Snell, returned to young people originally interviewed in 2003 to see how their religious lives had changed.

Smith, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, is a gutsy sociologist who does not mind tipping sacred cows or poking around in areas that theologians like to claim for themselves such as religious formation. His earlier book (with Melinda Lundquist Denton), Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, reported the first wave of NSYR findings. In 2007 Mark Oestreicher, then president of Youth Specialties, called Soul Searching one of the ten most influential youth ministry books—a first for a secular book on the sociology of religion.

Some findings:

Souls in Transition is a denser and in some ways more sobering volume [than Smith's previous book] that represents a field-shaping contribution to the growing literature on emerging adults (young people roughly between the ages of 18 and 30). As developmental tasks once associated with the teen years reach into the twenties and thirties, ministry with emerging adults shows signs of becoming the new youth ministry of 21st-century congregations. Compared to people in other age groups, emerging adults are less likely to attend religious services weekly, pray daily or affiliate strongly with a religious tradition (a fact consistent with their tendency to resist institutional affiliations generally). Yet on some measures (thinking about the afterlife, taking the Bible literally, self-identifying as liberals) they reflect the adult population as a whole.

The big story in Souls in Transition is continuity: highly devoted emerging adults almost always start out as highly devoted teenagers, and religiously disinterested youth are unlikely to become interested as they grow older. (Most teenagers in the NSYR who committed to God did so before age 14.) When religious change occurs in emerging adulthood, it tends to be in the negative direction. What makes the faith of some young people more durable than that of others seems to be the presence of formative religious influences in their lives while they are teenagers (especially religious parents, but also other faithful adults), teenagers’ personal embrace of faith, a lack of religious doubts, multiple religious experiences, and personal faith practices, especially prayer and Bible reading.

Another intriguing argument:

Smith saves his most intriguing analysis for a discussion of the implicit cultural influences of mainline Protestantism and American evangelicalism (for example, a Muslim girl describes her “personal relationship with God”). Drawing on sociologist N. Jay Demerath’s thesis that “liberal Protestantism’s core values—individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of personal experience—have come to so permeate the broader American culture” that these values no longer need liberal Protestantism to survive, Smith makes a fascinating move: he argues that young people are not more involved in American religious life because they don’t have to be. The values of America’s dominant religious outlook for the past century are now carried forward by American culture itself. Smith contends that many emerging adults have bought into an implicit “mainline-liberal Protestant” perspective on American culture and “would be quite comfortable with the kind of liberal faith described by the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 as being about ‘a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.’”

Science Daily highlighted a longitudinal study of aging and managing illness in a Florida retirement community:

Eva Kahana, Robson Professor of Sociology and director of the Elderly Care Research Center at Case Western Reserve, reported the findings from interviews with 100 cancer survivors. These survivors are part of a longitudinal study of 1,107 elderly adults living in a retirement community.

This study calls attention to generally accepting, timid behaviors that elderly patients report about their interactions with the healthcare system while battling cancer. Nevertheless the very same older adults offer advice to other older cancer patients to take a more activist stand and become advocates in their care.

This finding of the study overturns the notion that elderly patients are disinterested and disempowered health consumers, Kahana said.

In-depth interviews about their cancer experiences revealed elderly survivors became advocates for others battling cancer, though they had taken a more passive stance – “relying on physicians and family members” – during their own struggle. So…

The researchers said the findings suggest “a transition maybe occurring from passive to a more-active or even activist orientation due to the illness experience.”