The authors review demographic trends and research on families in the United States, with a
special focus on the past decade. They consider the following several topics:(a) marriage …

Cohabitation has risen dramatically in the United States in a very short time. So, too, has the
amount of sociological research devoted to the topic. In the span of a bit more than a …

Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social
problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at …

Although marriage is associated with a plethora of adult outcomes, its causal status remains
controversial in the absence of experimental evidence. We address this problem by …

Has the relationship between economic prospects and marriage formation in the United
States changed in recent decades? To answer this question, a discrete-time event-history …

A vast literature addresses the correlates of marital stability, but little is known about what
unites cohabiting partners over time. Although a specialized division of labor might increase …

Cohabitation is now the modal path to marriage in the United States. Drawing on data from
115 in‐depth interviews with cohabitors from the working and lower middle classes, this …

Using recently released cohabitation data for the male sample of the National Longitudinal
Survey of Youth, first interviewed in 1979, I conducted multinomial discrete-time event …

Marital status is a key determinant of psychological well-being. I use data from both waves of
the National Survey of Families and Households to evaluate the effect of union type (ie …

In this article, we use data from a new longitudinal survey—the Fragile Families and Child
Wellbeing Study—to examine union formation among unmarried parents who have just had …