Week 5: Discussion questions

Bumpass and Lu (2000)

1. What are some of the differences between marriage and cohabitation? How are they similar?

2. Bumpass and Lu find that the proportion of women who had ever cohabited has increased both within and across cohorts. What inferences about trends in cohabitation can we draw from this?

3. How are increases in cohabitation related to the rising age at marriage?

4. Bumpass and Lu find that over half of all first marriages were preceded by cohabitation. In most of these cases, the wife cohabited with her current husband prior to marriage. Many studies that are interested in the effects of union duration on a particular outcome use the date of the marriage to begin the clock on duration. What are the implications of increases in premarital cohabitation for these studies? When would it be appropriate to count the start of the union as the date that the couple began to live together? When would it be more appropriate to use the date of the marriage?

5. How is cohabitation related to increases in unmarried childbearing?

6. Bumpass and Lu note that there are racial differences in childbearing and in the types of families that children from different racial groups can expect to live in during their childhood. What are these differences and what might their implications be for the maintenance of inequality?

7. What are their findings about the amount of time that a child can expect to live in each type of family? How do they depend on the type of family that the child is born into? Would we expect the age of the child when these transitions occur to be important in how they affect him/her? Why or why not? Would we expect the number of transitions that occur during childhood to be important? Why or why not?

8. Bumpass and Lu find that the older an unmarried woman is when she has a birth, the less likely she is to ever marry. They explain this by noting that this may be because she is unable to find a partner due to preferences concerning a partner's age. However, pregnancy implies that the woman has found a partner (though perhaps not a marriageable one). Does Bumpass and Lu's explanation imply that women have different preferences regarding choosing a man to marry and choosing a man to have a child with? What other explanations for this result can you think of?

Clarkberg, Stolzenberg, and Waite (1995)

1. Clarkberg et. al. studied the effect of attitudes and values on union formation and union types. Specifically, they studied the effect of a 2-unit increase in attitudes, that is, change of response from "not important at all" to "very important" on a certain issue. Is there any problem in their way of analyzing data and interpreting the results?

2. Cohabitation both selects people and changes people. What kind of research design and data do you think would help to clarify the issues?

3. Cohabitation has been identified either directly or indirectly in surveys. What are these various ways of identifying cohabitors? What cautions should the researcher take in using these measures?

4. Clarkberg et al. found that people who cohabit have different expectations for their partners than those who marry. Bumpass et al. find that people with lower levels of education are more likely to cohabit. Do these differences imply that the "partner" markets faced by those who cohabit are different from the markets faced by people who do not?

Manning (1995)

1. Manning conceptualized cohabitation from the perspective of childbearing. What are her findings?

2. There are other ways to compare marriage and cohabitation, or cohabitation and being single. What are their findings?

3. Manning found the effects of cohabitation differ by the length of union experience. How does this finding help us to understand the cohabitation experience as a whole? How does this finding help us with the choice of data?

Thornton, Axinn, and Teachman (1995)

1. Why might we expect to find differences in union formation between those who are enrolled in school full-time and those who are enrolled in school part-time?

2. How does school enrollment (either part-time or full-time) affect the entrance into marriage? How does it affect the entrance into cohabitation? What are the differences observed between men and women?

3. How is the accumulation of schooling related to marriage? How is it related to cohabitation? How does this help us understand the differences between marriage and cohabitation?

4. Other authors have found that cohabitation relationships fall along a wide spectrum with some more closely resembling marriage, while others more closely resemble a single relationship. None of these studies take these differences within cohabitations into account. If we know that these differences exist, how can we interpret their results? How can we take into account these differences in our models? Do you think that taking into account these differences would affect our results?