title: Cohabiting and marriage during young men's career-development process.
abstract: 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-history analyses of how young men's career-development process affects both the formation and the dissolution of cohabiting unions. For a substantial proportion of young men, cohabitation seemed to represent an adaptive strategy during a period of career immaturity, whereas marriage was a far more likely outcome for both stably employed cohabitors and noncohabitors alike. Earnings positively affected the entry into either a cohabiting or marital union but exhibited a strong threshold effect. Once the men were in cohabiting unions, however, earnings had little effect on the odds of marrying. Men with better long-run socioeconomic prospects were far more likely to marry from either the noncohabiting or cohabiting state, and this was particularly true for blacks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, 264 Haines Hall, 1551, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. valko@ucla.edu
authors.forename: Valerie Kincade
authors.initials: VK
authors.lastname: Oppenheimer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D002322:Career Mobility; D015331:Cohort Studies; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008393:Marriage / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016017:Odds Ratio; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012111:Residence Characteristics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology; D044465:White People / Q000706:statistics & numerical data