Cohabiting and marriage during young men's career-development process.
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.
Oppenheimer
Valerie Kincade
VK
Department of Sociology, 264 Haines Hall, 1551, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. valko@ucla.edu
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