The transition to adulthood has become a thriving area of research in life course studies. This review is organized around two of the field's emerging themes. The first theme is the increasing variability in pathways to adult roles through historical time. The second theme is a heightened sensitivity to transition behaviors as developmental processes. Accounts of such processes typically examine the active efforts of young people to shape their biographies or the socially structured opportunities and limitations that define pathways into adulthood. By joining these concepts, I suggest new lines of inquiry that focus on the interplay between agency and social structures in the shaping of lives.

Pathways to Adulthood in Changing Societies: Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective

Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status. Furthermore, scholarly research on marriage attitudes among low-SES women suffers from a lack of up-to-date qualitative work. This study draws on qualitative interviews with 292 low-income single' mothers in three U.S. cities. Inductive analysis reveals five primary motivations for non-marriage among low-income single mothers. Most mothers agree that potential marriage partners must earn significantly more than the minimum wage, but also emphasize the importance of stability of employment, source of earnings, and the effort men expend to find and keep their jobs. Mothers place equal or greater emphasis on non-monetary factors such as how marriage may diminish or enhance respectability, how it may limit their control over household decisions, their mistrust of men, and their fear of domestic violence. Affordability, respectability, and control have greater salience for African American mothers, while trust and domestic violence have greater salience for whites. The author discusses these findings in relation to existing theories of marriage and in light of welfare reform.

https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~gwallace/Papers/Edin%20(2000).pdf

What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?

Individual demographic characteristics and aggregate population processes are central to many theoretical perspectives and empirical models of criminal behavior. Recent research underscores the importance of criminal and deviant behavior for understanding the demography of the life course and macrolevel population processes. We review research that explores the multiple linkages and reciprocal relations between criminal and demographic behavior at both microsocial and macrosocial levels. In reviewing research on how demography affects crime, we describe current debates over the impact of age, sex, and race on criminal behavior, and we distinguish between compositional and contextual effects of demographic structure on aggregate crime rates. Our review of how crime affects demography focuses on the intersection of criminal and demographic events in the life course, and the influence of criminal victimization and aggregate crime rates on residential mobility, migration, and population redistribution. Direct...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/223438.pdf

Crime and Demography: Multiple Linkages, Reciprocal Relations

"This article attempts to shed light on the oft-observed relationship between age at marriage and marital dissolution by first deriving a hypothesis from marital search theory that relates both variables to the supply of spousal alternatives in the local marriage market. This hypothesis states that, relative to people who marry later in life, persons who marry at comparatively young ages will be especially susceptible to divorce when confronted with abundant alternatives to their current spouse. Marital history data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth were then merged with aggregated data from the Public Use Microdata Samples of the 1980 U.S. census to test this hypothesis." The author finds that "discrete-time event history analyses offer no support for this hypothesis. Although the risk of marital dissolution is highest where either husbands or wives chance numerous spousal alternatives, the impact of age at marriage on divorce is significantly weaker in marriage markets containing abundant remarriage opportunities. Some of the effect of age at marriage on marital dissolution is attributable to the detrimental impact of early marriage on educational attainment."

Do You Need to Shop Around?: Age at Marriage, Spousal Alternatives, and Marital Dissolution

This article uses data from the 1973-2006 General Social Survey to assess the interactive impact of race and gender on marital happiness over time. Findings indicate independent and significant effects for both variables, with Whites and husbands reporting greater marital happiness than Blacks and wives. Comparing four subgroups (White husbands, White wives, Black husbands, and Black wives), the authors find that White husbands report the highest levels of marital happiness whereas Black wives report the lowest. Assessment of trends from the 1970s to the 2000s reveals a convergence among the groups: Although White husbands consistently report the highest levels of marital happiness, there has been a steady decline in the gap between all four groups. Most notably, Black wives exhibit a significant increase in marital happiness relative to the other groups. Findings are discussed in the context of the changing structure and composition of families in contemporary U.S. society.

Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, 1973 to 2006

Previous research has typically ignored the spatial dimension of marriage markets focusing instead on highly aggregated data or on individual models of entry into marriage. A basic premise of our study is that [U.S.] marriage trends are played out across local marriage market areas that define female opportunities for marriage. Using local area data from the newly-released 1980 Public Use Microdata Sample (D file) we provide a direct test of several competing explanations of the apparent retreat from marriage and of black and white differences. Our analysis reveals that (a) local economic opportunities (including welfare) for females spouse availability and urbanization contribute significantly to spatial variations in female marriage rates; (b) the local supply of economically attractive males plays an especially large role in the marital behaviors of U.S. black and white women; and (c) racial differences in marriage market conditions accentuate but do not explain completely black-white differences in marriage rates. This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (see Population Index Vol. 55 No. 3 Fall 1989 p. 392). (EXCERPT)

Local marriage market conditions and the marital behavior of black and white women.

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Local marriage market conditions and the marital behavior of black and white women.