1) What are some of the various mechanisms through which parents may influence their children's decisions regarding cohabitation and marriage?

2) How do they suggest that sexual history is related to the age of entering a cohabiting or marital relationship? How about to the choice between cohabitation and marriage?

3) They talk a little bit about what sociologists refer to as "selectivity" - that the link between early dating/sexual activity and the both age of first union formation and the type of first union may be related to individual characteristics that researchers typically cannot observe. What are some of these characteristics?

4) What are some of the ways in which they suggest that a person's religion or religious background may influence union formation?

5) How do the authors suggest that union formation experiences may be related to people's early-life school experiences and aspirations?

6) The authors summarize many factors that have been shown to influence the age of marriage. How do they suggest that these same factors may influence the age of cohabitation or the choice between marriage or cohabitation?

7) What do they see as some of the important factors in cohabiting couples' decision to marry?

8) How might the recency of parents' immigration influence children's union formation behavior? How about the effect of parents' rural/farm background?

9) How might parents socioeconomic status be related to the union formation experiences of their children?

10) How might parents' own union formation and union dissolution experiences influence children's union formation experiences?

11) How might parent-child relationships influence children's union formation experiences?