lifecourse

USA Today ran a story yesterday about a new federally funded ad campaign about marriage. Reporter Sharon Jayson writes, “Marriage has turned into quite a quandary for many young adults. Should they or shouldn’t they? Can they escape divorce? Will moving in together forestall a breakup? These conflicted feelings haven’t gone without notice in Washington.”

The latest statistics have caused some concern among policymakers…

The average age at first marriage is now almost 26 for women and 28 for men. And a growing percentage of Americans aren’t marrying at all: Provisional federal statistics released Tuesday report 7.1 marriages per 1,000 people in 2008, down from 10 per 1,000 in 1986.

This new campaign seeks to change that… with the help of a sociologist….

Faced with such numbers, the federal government is funding a $5 million national media campaign that launches this month, extolling the virtues of marriage for those ages 18 to 30.

“We’re not telling people ‘Get married’ but ‘Don’t underestimate the benefits of marriage,’ ” says Paul Amato, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist and adviser to the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center, which is spearheading the campaign.

The resource center, a federally funded virtual clearinghouse, works under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families.

Research suggests a bevy of benefits for those who marry, including better health, greater wealth and more happiness for the couple, and improved well-being for children.

Amato’s comments:

“These are people who are in the prime marrying age. A lot of them have not had good role models about how to have a successful marriage,” says Amato, co-author of the 2007 book Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing.

“Marriage has become more optional, and it’s a different world out there. That’s why we think it’s important to focus on this group of young people, because the rules are less clear.”

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today reported on new research out of Michigan State University suggesting that many students who apply for and receive early admission to the college of their choice regret the decision. The newspaper presents this study as further evidence that high school students should avoid the early-admission rush so they will not regret the decision later in life.

Bad timing is the culprit. “Many young people are being pressured to making college choices before they are developmentally ready,” says Michigan State University sociologist Barbara Schneider, author of a report released today that examines the psychological and social implications of admission policies. Though she says that case “has yet to be made empirically,” she cites her forthcoming research suggesting “students who make these choices very early, without having opportunities to explore other options, (in their 20s) report some dissatisfaction with their college choices and lives.”

Although it looks as though this needs to be fleshed-out more before any definitive claims can be made, USA Today found additional anecdotal support for the idea…

David Hawkins of the non-profit National Association for College Admission Counseling says the findings support some members’ concerns that students are being rushed. The group’s 2005 survey found that 25% of responding colleges accept some applicants before they start their senior year. Some recruiters have waived application fees or offered priority housing to students who apply as juniors. The group now bars colleges from admitting a student until after they get a junior year transcript. Harvard, Stanford and other selective schools have softened binding early-admission policies so that admitted students could apply elsewhere, too.

Read more.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today on new research from sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University about the impact of living together before marriage. The Chronicle reports: 

Spurred by the sexual revolution and buoyed by recent economic concerns and marital trends, cohabitation – as a temporary situation, a lengthy arrangement or something in between – has become a unique, multifaceted institution in its own right, and a hot field of study among sociologists.

It’s not without controversy. Conventional wisdom – backed up by studies in the 1980s and ’90s – has held that so-called serial cohabitants have higher divorce rates than those who wait until marriage to live together. However, new data suggest that when someone cohabits only with a future spouse, divorce rates are the same or lower than if they didn’t live together before marriage.

But new research from a number of sociologists suggests its time to revise our views on the effects of living together:

A study published in November by sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University found that the odds of divorce among women who married their sole cohabiting partner were 28 percent lower than those of women who never cohabited. (See “Behind the numbers” story on D3.)

“They used to say that cohabitation was a risk factor for divorce. Now that we have broader samples, that’s not true,” says Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and author of “Marriage, a History.”

The majority of Americans now live together before getting married. Of couples married after 1995, 65 percent of men and women in first-time marriages lived together beforehand, according to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth.

“For most people, cohabitation is still a transition point,” says University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock. “This is not the case for everyone, as there is an increase in the percentage of cohabiters who live together for a long period of time – a subgroup for whom it’s not just a train stop. But by and large, cohabiting relationships tend to be short, as the couple either breaks up or marries within a number of years.”

She expects that in coming years, as much as 80 percent of the population will live together unmarried at some point in their lives, up from the current 70 percent.

One can’t talk about cohabitation without also talking about marriage. As the average age of a first marriage in the United States has risen to 27 years for men and 25 for women, young adults are filling in before that with “marriage lite,” in Coontz’s words.

Read more.

This morning the New York Times ran a story about new research indicating that teen pregnancies are on the rise once again. The Times’ Tara Parker-Pope reports, “Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome. It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.”

Building the case that this is a myth:

The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

Call in the sociologist!

“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”

One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.

In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).

And another…

“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”

“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.

“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”

Read the full story.

Newswise has highlighted a new study by Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins titled the ‘Changing Contours of Work.’ In the study, the authors present a picture of the ‘new economy’ characterized by a lack of job security or upward mobility experienced by the majority of workers. Sweet and Meiksins call for a ‘new deal’ to address these issues, including a new worker’s bill of rights. Sweet notes, ““If you look back to the Fair Labor Standards Act —that said if you want to employ a worker more than 40 hours a week you have to pay them overtime at time-and-a-half. This is a wonderful way of reorganizing and creating a disincentive for employing workers for long hours; it could also benefit potential workers who are not in the labor force. The Act did exactly what it was intended to do. Now, it is not working as well, so we have to rethink how we are going to provide health care, how we are going to keep workers from being overworked and how we are going to provide levels of security that currently don’t exist. In short, we need to rethink what we need to expect from employers, what we need to expect from our government, unions and from each other in the workplace.”

About the study…

“Make no mistake, there is a new economy,” says Stephen Sweet, lead-author of “Changing Contours of Work” and an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College. He explains how the new economy has opened up prospects for working in new ways and created opportunities for new groups of workers. “But one problematic feature of the new economy is the way it segregates opportunity into ‘good jobs’ (that are increasingly fragile) and ‘bad jobs’ that lack benefits, livable wages and prospects for mobility,” says Sweet. Thus, he explains that the new economy creates chasms that separate many workers from reasonable working conditions, reasonable chances of upward mobility, reasonable chances of job security and reasonable chances to earn a living wage.

But what should we do about it? (According to the authors…)

“As we consider social policy, a key question concerns how to make the new economy work for everyone. This includes dismantling gender and racial chasms, but also addressing the needs of workers laboring in jobs that provide few resources.”

Read on.

The Boston Globe reports, “Husbands do it by gassing up their spouse’s car. Wives do it by having a heart-to-heart confessional. Each is expressing intimacy, but in a stereotypical Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus fashion. As Framingham State College sociologist Virginia Rutter notes, “Both men and women value a feeling of closeness with their partner, but they get to that feeling by somewhat different routes.” And they often think their partner is taking the wrong route.”

Stephanie Cootz (for the Globe) writes:

Over the past 30 years, however, husbands and wives have become much less likely to specialize exclusively in either breadwinning or nurturing. As men and women try to mix and match the traits that were once parceled out between them, the 19th-century gender differences in emotional orientation hamper a couple’s ability to sustain relationships that are now based on equality and friendship. A growing body of research confirms that men and women who hold traditional gender attitudes have lower-quality relationships than couples with more gender-neutral values.

Rutter’s response…

Rutter argues that we can “learn to draw from both the masculine and the feminine tool kits.” She points to studies showing that children who combine what are usually thought of as masculine and feminine coping skills have higher academic and social skills than more “traditional” boys and girls. Such flexibility also translates into higher marital quality later in life. This may be why University of Washington researcher John Gottman finds that same-sex couples, who tend to combine “male” and “female” emotional styles, remain calmer and more positive with each other during disagreements than do heterosexual couples.

Take home message?

So where men need to learn how to connect with painful feelings, women need to learn when to step back from such feelings to engage in activities that calm both partners down. And sometimes, when deciding whether to use the “female” or the “male” way of making up after an argument, couples might be better off splitting the difference. Instead of talking it out before sex or having sex before talking it out, why not head off to a movie and hold hands in the dark?

Read on…

The Boston Globe reports on a series of new studies which draw upon mapping social networks and behavioral economics to help us better understand those new year’s resolutions to lose weight. These studies suggest that a spouse’s weight loss success can rub off on the other.

The study from the University of Connecticut says that couples not only tend to gain weight together, they can also lose it as a pair, even if only one of them is enrolled in a formal program. The spouses of the patients who attended regular meetings to encourage making dietary changes lost about five pounds over the course of a year, according to the results of the large clinical trial that examined weight loss strategies for people with type 2 diabetes.

“It was impressive, given they were not involved in the study program,” Amy A. Gorin, assistant professor of psychology at UConn and lead author of the article published in the International Journal of Obesity, said in an interview. “Intervening with one person in a family has a larger impact than we realized before.”

This new study draws upon the work of sociologist Nicholas Christakis…

Harvard sociologist and internist Dr. Nicholas Christakis made waves with a study last year linking obesity to social networks. Gorin, who cites his work in her paper, finds the power of peer influence encouraging when it’s flipped to the positive side.

Among the 357 couples she tracked, many of their food choices in the home became healthier – fewer potato chips and more fruits and vegetables, for example. Physical activity picked up, too.

“For some people, it was motivating to see someone start to exercise and eat healthier food,” she said, citing anecdotal evidence.

“I think my message would be, don’t underestimate the power of the environment on you,” she said. “If you start your New Year’s resolution with ‘I’m going to have enough willpower this time,’ I think you set yourself up for failure if you don’t have the support of the environment around you.”

Read more.

Thursday morning USA Today reported on a new findings from a study of the Pew Research Center’s survey data, which shows that Americans are feeling pulled closer to home. 

USA Today reports:

The majority of U.S.-born adults (56%) have not lived outside their birth state, suggests research out Wednesday, and of the 37% who have stayed in their hometown, three-quarters say the main reason is because they want to be near family. Fifteen percent have lived in four or more states.

Pew Research Center’s survey paints a vivid portrait about how Americans feel about their hometowns at a time when geographic mobility is at the lowest levels since the government began keeping statistics in 1948. Pew cites government that data shows 13.2% moved from 2006 to 2007, down from a high of 21.2% in 1951. Census figures to be released in 2009 confirm the trend, showing a dip to 11.9%.

The sociological commentary…

Duke University sociologist Angela O’Rand says economic uncertainty causes people to dig in where they are, making them less likely to risk moving. “Family provides in an uncertain world some level of safety and certainty,” O’Rand says.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports this morning on recent speculation that financial woes from the deepening recession may mean that families will be having fewer children. The AJC reports on how parents are increasingly filled with doubts about their ability to provide for additional children as job prospects shrink, retirement savings plummet, and home values continue to fall.

Many economists fear that the recession will become one of the worst since the Great Depression. When that hit in the 1930s, the birthrate dropped precipitously, and the effects of having fewer people in the work force rippled through the economy two decades later. “If you can’t pay your mortgage, the last thing on your mind is to have another child,” said Dr. Khalil Tabsh, chief of obstetrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who expects to start seeing a drop in pregnancies.

Bring in the sociologists…

Starting or growing a family often becomes more of a financial decision than an emotional one as parents calculate the sometimes overwhelming costs of health care, child care, education and other necessities, said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University.

Though birthrates usually decline in a recession, there is a countervailing theory popular with some economists: Births may swell. Some women who lose their jobs may decide it’s an opportune time to raise a child, said Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist and sociologist.

Read more.

If you enjoyed the Crawler’s first look at the new study from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-author James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, about the transmission of happiness, take a look at the latest installment courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times. 

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Read on.