The Demography of Families: A Review of Patterns and Change.

The authors review demographic trends and research on families in the United States, with a special focus on the past decade. They consider the following several topics: (a) marriage and remarriage, (b) divorce, (c) cohabitation, (d) fertility, (e) same-gender unions, (f) immigrant families, and (g) children's living arrangements. Throughout, the authors review both overall trends and patterns as well as those by social class and race-ethnicity.

Cohabitation and Marital Expectations among Single Millennials in the U.S.

Cohabitation has surpassed marriage as the most common union experience in young adulthood. We capitalize on a new opportunity to examine both marital and cohabitation expectations among young single women in recently collected, nationally representative data (National Survey of Family Growth 2011-2015) (=1,467). In the U.

The Best of Intentions: A Structural Analysis of the Association between Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Unintended Pregnancy in a Sample of Mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979).

Objectives: Births to less educated women are more likely to be classified as unintended than other births. We question a common interpretation that this association reflects a lack of contraceptive knowledge or self-efficacy among less educated women. We theorize that differences in early life educational advantages structure pregnancy desires and the salience and opportunity costs of precise fertility timing.

Cohabitation Expectations among Young Adults in the United States: Do They Match Behavior?

Cohabitation continues to rise, but there is a lack of knowledge about expectations to cohabit and the linkage between expectations and subsequent cohabitation. We capitalize on a new opportunity to study cohabitation expectations by drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79) main youth and two waves (2008 and 2010) of the NLSY young adult (YA) surveys (n=1,105). We find considerable variation in cohabitation expectations: 39.

The Decoupling of Marriage and Parenthood? Trends in the Timing of Marital First Births, 1945-2002.

Family formation changed dramatically over the twentieth century in the United States. The impact of these changes on childbearing has primarily been studied in terms of nonmarital fertility. However, changes in family formation behavior also have implications for fertility marriage.

Divorce and women's risk of health insurance loss.

This article bridges the literatures on the economic consequences of divorce for women with that on marital transitions and health by focusing on women's health insurance. Using a monthly calendar of marital status and health insurance coverage from 1,442 women in the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we examine how women's health insurance changes after divorce. Our estimates suggest that roughly 115,000 American women lose private health insurance annually in the months following divorce and that roughly 65,000 of these women become uninsured.

He Says, She Says: Gender and Cohabitation.

Cohabitation has become the modal path to marriage in the United States. However, little is known about what cohabitation means to young adults today. Drawing on data from 18 focus groups (N=138) and 54 in-depth interviews with young adults, this exploratory study investigates motivations to cohabit, and examines potential gender differences in those motivations and the meanings attached to them.

The Role of Romantic Partners, Family and Peer Networks in Dating Couples' Views about Cohabitation.

Emerging adults are increasingly cohabiting, but few studies have considered the role of social context in the formation of their views of cohabitation. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with dating couples, we explored the role of romantic partners, family, and peers on evaluations of cohabitation. In couples where each member had a differing view about cohabitation, one romantic partner's desire to not cohabit trumped their partner's more ambivalent feelings about cohabitation.