For Better and For Worse: How Marital Perspectives Structure the Transition to Adulthood

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 22. Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

Given demographic trends toward a later age at first marriage, the study of marriage has been increasingly detached from the study of young adulthood, particularly among Blacks. Recent theoretical developments, however, like marital horizon theory (MHT), suggest that this movement away from the study of marriage early in the life course has been premature. MHT argues that, rather than being irrelevant to the transition to adulthood, young people’s marital perspectives structure their experiences of this transition and, hence, help to explain variation within this developmental period. Using longitudinal data on several hundred unmarried African Americans drawn from the Family and Community Health Study, the current study tests the propositions of MHT by examining the ways in which marital perspectives prior to the transition to adulthood structure trajectories of health-risk behaviors, education, and cohabitation experiences across this transition. Results support the core contention of MHT in each of the aforementioned domains. That is, young African Americans’ marital perspectives, particularly marital salience, helped to explain variation in health-risk behavior, educational attainment, and cohabitation experiences during the transition to adulthood. Importantly, however, the ways in which they did so complicate existing assumptions by both sociologists and policy makers regarding the benefits of a positive orientation toward marriage.

Author

• Ashley Brooke Barr, State University of New York-Buffalo