Marriage Norms in the United States: A Nationally Stratified Factorial Survey Experiment

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate norms about marriage in the United States and to identify whether marriage norms vary by race, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES). In particular, we probe the character of marriage norms by examining their polarity, conditionality, and level of consensus. We develop a factorial survey experiment of norms about marriage and administer it to a disproportionate stratified random sample of U.S. adults (N = 1823). The results indicate that proscriptive, prescriptive, and bipolar norms co-occur, as do individuals subscribing to unconditional norms, conditional norms, and nonexistent norms. While roughly two-thirds of the measured norms are bipolar, a minority are proscriptive and prescriptive. The findings also suggest that conditions governing norms about marriage include pecuniary (economic bar) and non-pecuniary (relationship quality and pregnancy status) circumstances. Individual tendencies to prescribe or proscribe marriage differ by race (whites more prescriptive than blacks) and gender (men more prescriptive than women) but inconsistently so for SES. Finally, men and women, blacks and whites, and people of low and high SES place different weights on the circumstances governing marriage, particularly relationship quality and pregnancy status.

Authors

• Blaine G. Robbins, New York University-Abu Dhabi

• Aimée R. Dechter, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sabino Kornrich, New York University-Abu Dhabi