marriage/family

A new article reports the findings from a longitudinal study that followed 667 women who had early- and later-term abortions for three years after their procedure. Dr. Corinne Rocca and her colleagues asked women if they felt that the abortion was the “right decision” at one week and approximately every six months thereafter.

This is your image of the week:

Percent of women reporting that abortion was the right decision over three years:

Over 99% of the women said that the abortion was the right decision at every time point. The line that looks like the upper barrier of the graph? That’s the data.

Overall, measures of negative emotions were relatively low — an average score of under 4 on a 16-point scale at one week and declining to about 2 at three years — and were higher for women who had a more difficult time deciding whether to get an abortion or who subsequently had planned pregnancies. Whether the abortion occurred in the first trimester or near the legal limit did not correlate with emotional response.

In contrast, women reported twice as many positive emotions at one week. Over time, positive feelings about the abortion declined along with negative ones, suggesting that the experience became less emotionally charged overall with distance from the procedure.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Flashback Friday.

The number crunchers at OK Cupid recently looked at how age preferences disadvantage older women on the site.  First, the post’s author, Christian Rudder, points out, the distribution of singles is pretty matched by sex at most ages:

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that women and men of the same age are reaching out to one another.

Women at most ages state a preference to date men who are up to eight years older or eight years younger:

But men show a decided preference for younger women, especially as the men get older:And, Rudder notes, men target their messages to women even younger than their stated preference.  In this figure, the greenest areas represent where men are sending more messages and the red areas are where they are sending less:

So, even though men and women are more-or-less proportionately represented on the site, men’s decided preference for younger women makes for many fewer potential dates for older women.

Here’s what the dating pool looks like for 21-year-olds (the blue = men seeking women who are 21; the pink = women seeking men who are 21):

For 25 year olds:

For 30 year olds:

Rudder offers this summary measuring how a person’s desirability changes over time:

He writes:

…we can see that women have more pursuers than men until age 26, but thereafter a man can expect many more potential dates than a woman of the same age. At the graph’s outer edge, at age 48, men are nearly twice as sought-after as women.

Thus opportunities for dating are shaped by the intersection of gender and age to the detriment of women over 26 and men under 26.

Originally posted in 2010.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

On June 26th, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that bans on same-sex marriage violate the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution. This is your image of the week:

Source: Slate.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Legal status of same-sex marriage in the U.S.:

• 2015: Supreme Court rules ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional
• 2013: A great year for marriage equality
• 2012: Map of the state legality of same-sex marriage in the U.S.

The social psychology of same-sex marriage:

• Why are people changing their minds on same-sex marriage?
• The contact hypothesis: Does knowing a gay person change your mind?
• Americans underestimate how many other Americans support same-sex marriage

Politicians on same-sex marriage:

• Politicians followed, didn’t lead, on same-sex marriage
• Politicians overestimate their constituents’ conservatism

Humor/commentary:

• Who enjoys “traditional” marriage?
• Challenging the definition of marriage equality
• What exactly do we mean by “traditional”?

Changing public opinion on same-sex marriage:

• 2012: Support for same-sex marriage rising in every demographic
• 2012: Political affiliation and support for same-sex marriage
• 2010: Increasing cultural acceptance of gay and lesbian rights

Discourse:

• Naming marriage between people of the same sex
• Same-sex marriage and the social construction of social problems
• Individualist vs. social frames for favoring same-sex marriage
• Rhetorical strategy in the same-sex marriage debate
• Framing North Carolina’s Amendment One
• The changing definition of family

The movement for same-sex marriage:

• Outing Prop. 8 supporters on Google Maps
• Stigmatizing cousin marriage in an argument for same-sex marriage
• Using children in anti-same-sex marriage ads
• “Yes on Prop. 8”: Heteronormative, pro-natal, and anti-miscegenation
• A rainbow coalition against same-sex marriage
• Highlighting the economic impact of same-sex marriage
• Rhetorical strategy in the same-sex marriage debate
• Framing North Carolina’s Amendment One

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

A new study from the Families and Work Institute compared household divisions of labor in 225 other-sex couples and same-sex couples in which both partners worked. The researchers found that same-sex couples are more likely than different-sex couples to share responsibility for chores. Eyeball the two graphs below and look for the green; that’s the bar that indicates that both people in the couple share responsibility. The first is different-sex couples and the second is same-sex.

Same-sex couples, though, are no sharing utopia in which everyone does exactly 50% of everything. They are still more likely to divide up household labor than share it — that is, the blue and yellow bars indicating the higher or lower earner, respectively, still dominate the graph. And, interestingly, the gendered nature of the labor is still present in that the lower earner in same-sex couples tends to do the same labor as the female in different-sex couples.

The data is more dramatic, though, when we look at parenting. Same-sex couples are more likely to share the responsibility for routine child care (74%) than leave it primarily up to one person. The same goes for sick child care (62%). Among different sex couples, the opposite is true. One parent generally takes primary responsibility for routine (62%) and sick (68%) child care.

There is no secret recipe, of course, to how a couple should divide their household chores and childcare. There is a take home lesson from the study, though, and that’s to talk about it if you want to. Generally speaking, members of couples who talked about it before moving in together (blue) were more satisfied with their division of labor than members of couples who wanted to have a conversation, but didn’t (yellow).

The authors of the study found that women in relationships with men were the most likely of all to say that they wanted to have a conversation, but didn’t (20%). Men in either same- (11%) or different-sex couples (11%) and women in same-sex couples (15%) were less likely to have held their tongue.

The author of the report concludes that it may not be how we divide up labor that matters that drives satisfaction, or even whether we talk about it, but whether we fail to have a conversation that we want.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

We’ve highlighted the really interesting research coming out of the dating site OK Cupid before. It’s great stuff and worth exploring:

• Common lies in online profiles
• Evidence that we care waaaaaaay too much about looks
• Sex, desirability, and age: what they say and what they do
• Only 20% of self-identified bisexuals message both men and women
• Does similarity really translate into compatibility?
• How useful is the concept of sexual orientation?
• Word clouds by race and gender reveal most commonly mentioned ideas

All of those posts offer neat lessons about research methods, too. And so does the video below of co-founder Christian Rudder talking about how they’ve collected and used the data. It might be fun to show in research methods classes because it raises some interesting questions like: What are different kinds of social science data? How can/should we manipulate respondents to get it? What does it look like? How can it be used to answer questions? Or, how can we understand the important difference between having the data and doing an interpretation of it? That is, the data-don’t-speak-for-themselves issue.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

At the end of this month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether the Constitution requires states to allow same-sex marriages and to recognize same-sex marriages allowed in other states. In the arguments heard in the lower courts and the record-setting number of amici filed for this case, debate has often veered from whether same-sex couples should be able to marry and waded into the question of how they parent children. Social science research has been front and center in this debate, with a variety of studies examining whether families with two parents of a different sex provide better environments for raising children than two parents of the same sex.

No differences? In general, these studies have examined differences in children’s developmental outcomes to make inferences about differences in what is happening in the home, conflating how children do with the ways that people parent in same-sex and different-sex couples. The “no differences” conclusion refers to the fact that few studies have revealed significant differences in these outcomes between children raised by different-sex parents and same-sex parents. This conclusion about parenting based on data on children, however, may be biased in both directions. For example, same-sex couples are more likely to adopt “hard-to-place” children from the foster care system. They are also more likely to have children who have experienced family instability because they transitioned into new family settings after being in families headed by ‘straight’ couples. Both of these factors are known to affect children’s wellbeing, but they are not as strongly tied to parenting.

New study clarifies. In our new study in the June issue of Demography, we directly address the arguments being made about differences in parenting in two-parent families by examining parents’ actual behaviors. Using the nationally representative American Time Use Survey, we examine how much time parents in same-sex and different-sex couples spend in child-focused activities during a 24-hour period, controlling for a wide range of factors that are also associated with parenting, such as income, education, time spent at work, and the number and age of children in the family. By ‘child-focused’ time, we mean time spent engaged with children in activities that support their physical and cognitive development, like reading to them, playing with them, or helping them with their homework.

Supporting a no differences conclusion, our study finds that women and men in same-sex relationships and women in different-sex relationships do not differ in the amount of time they spend in child-focused activities (about 100 minutes a day). We did find one difference, however, as men in different-sex relationships spend only half as much child-focused time as the other three types of parents. Averaging across mothers and fathers, we determined that children with same-sex parents received an hour more of child-focused parent time a day (3.5 hours) than children in different-sex families (2.5 hours).

A key implication of our study is that the focus on whether same-sex parents provide depreciably different family contexts for healthy child development is misplaced. If anything, the results show that same-sex couples are more likely to invest time in the types of parenting behaviors that support child development. In line with a recent study that has continued to highlight that poverty — more so than family structure — is the greatest detriment to parenting practices, it’s hard not to see how delegitimizing same-sex families in ways that create both social and economic costs for them, pose a greater source of disadvantage for children.

Cross-posted at Families as They Really Are and Pacific Standard.

Kate Prickett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Alexa Martin-Storey is a developmental psychologist and Assistant Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Sherbrooke, Quebec. You can find their new study (with Robert Crosnoe) here.

New data collected for the Shriver Report offers a telling insight into modern marriage. They asked 818 men representative of the adult U.S. population to choose three “qualities that [they] most want” in a daughter from a set of 10. Offering the same list, they asked which qualities they wanted in a wife or female partner. Intelligence topped both lists but, from there, responses diverged.

This is your image of the week:

Men were pretty consistent in what they wanted for their daughters. A majority said intelligence (81%) and two thirds (66%) said independence. Almost half (48%) said they wanted their daughters to be strong.

But, as a group, they were significantly more ambivalent about what they wanted from wives. Some wanted intelligence, independence, and strength, but many fewer wanted that in wives compared to daughters: 34% said they wanted independent wives and 28% said they wanted strong ones. Compared to what they wanted for daughters, they were much more likely to say they wanted attractiveness (45% vs. 11%), sweetness (34% vs. 19%), nurturing (27% vs. 18%), and homemaking (14% vs. 5%) from wives.

This is fascinating data. It looks like the majority of men want strong, successful, independent daughters, but there is still a significant number who hope for wives who are willing to put their husbands before themselves.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.