Diverging Marriage Patterns: How Do Economic, Cultural, and Social Resources Matter?

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. Union Formation

Abstract

Marriage continues to be a site of resource pooling and distribution, and as a result, changing marriage patterns have important implications for the persistence of broad social inequality. Indeed, there have been stark differences in how marriage patterns have changed by educational attainment: less and moderately educated adults experienced much larger declines in marriage than the more highly educated. Explanations of these patterns have focused primarily on declining economic resources among those with lower levels of education. Yet education is also associated with many social and cultural attitudes and behaviors that influence marriage patterns, and recent research suggests that the relationship between education and these social and cultural resources may be strengthening. In this paper, I draw on over four decades of data from the General Social Survey to examine the extent to which changing relationships between education and economic, cultural, and social resources account for variation in marriage patterns. Results suggest that accounting for broad social and economic changes reduces the education gap in marriage, though the process appears to be different for men and women. Economic resources reduce the overall size of the education gap in marriage for men but do not eliminate the pattern of divergence. Among women, the opposite occurs: here, accounting for economic resources reduces the pattern of divergence but not the overall education gap. Cultural and social resources account for some of the changing relationship between education and marriage for men, but not for women.

Author

• Alicia VanOrman, University of Madison