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Change in the Stability of First Premarital Cohabitation Among Women in the United States, 1983–2013

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Demography

Abstract

The rapid growth in cohabitation over the past quarter-century necessitates studies of changes in the stability and outcomes of cohabitation. We utilized data from the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and the most recent NSFG data from 2011–2013 to examine the outcomes of two comparable cohorts of first premarital cohabiting women (1983–1988 and 2006–2013). Our results showed that cohabitations formed between 2006 and 2013 lasted longer—18 months, on average—than those formed in the mid-1980s, which lasted for an average of 12 months. We found that the lengthening of cohabitation over time cuts across sociodemographic characteristics—race/ethnicity, education, and motherhood status—and resulted mostly from the declining rate of transitioning to marriage. We found some support for the diverging destinies perspective in that disparities in the outcomes of cohabitation by education and by cohabiting birth have widened over time. Our analyses showed that changes in the outcomes of first premarital cohabiting unions over the past three decades were not due to compositional shifts in cohabitors. These results demonstrate the evolving dynamics of cohabitation over a 30-year window.

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Notes

  1. Because of the upper age limit of the NSFG, the retrospective construction of cohorts is problematic, resulting in analyses that represent experiences of only older respondents. For example, the 2011–2013 NSFG cannot be used to analyze outcomes of cohabitations formed in 1985 because it would reflect the experiences of only respondents aged 42–44 (15–17 in 2012). Similarly, analyses of cohabitations formed in 1990 using the same data would reflect the experiences of respondents who were 15–22 years old in 1990 (37–44 in 2012).

  2. Our comparisons of the timing of college graduation (available in the 2011–2013 but not in the 1988 NSFG) and the timing of first premarital cohabitation showed that 89 % of the college-educated women in the 2006–2013 cohort obtained their degrees before or during their first premarital cohabitations; all of them were already in college when they started cohabiting. Similarly, based on the timing of high school graduation in the 2011–2013 NSFG, the majority (80 %) of women with a high school diploma in our sample had the same levels of education at the time of cohabitation. Educational attainment at the time of interview appears to largely reflect education at the time of cohabitation.

  3. To address the issue of temporal ordering in the measurement of respondent’s education, we considered replacing respondent’s education with mother’s education. We found that mother’s education does not fully capture respondent’s educational attainment. As shown in Table A1 of the online appendix, less than one-third of respondents with a college degree had a college-educated mother. In the multivariate analyses (Table A2 of the online appendix), relying on solely mother’s education and not accounting for respondent’s education results in a slightly different conclusion about social class. In our exploratory models, we found that controlling for maternal education as an indicator of social class did not change our results or alter our conclusions. We excluded maternal education from our analyses to minimize collinearity problems.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Center for Family and Demographic Research (CFDR) at Bowling Green State University. The CFDR has core funding from The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (P2CHD050959).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, 1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway, Colorado Springs, CO, 80918, USA

    Esther O. Lamidi

  2. Department of Sociology & Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, 43403, USA

    Wendy D. Manning & Susan L. Brown

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  1. Esther O. Lamidi
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Correspondence to Esther O. Lamidi.

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Lamidi, E.O., Manning, W.D. & Brown, S.L. Change in the Stability of First Premarital Cohabitation Among Women in the United States, 1983–2013. Demography 56, 427–450 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00765-7

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