Early Marriage, Premarital Fertility, and Marital Dissolution
- 1 March 1983
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Family Issues
- Vol. 4 (1) , 105-126
- https://doi.org/10.1177/019251383004001006
Abstract
This research investigates the impact of age at first marriage and premarital fertility status on subsequent marital dissolution for both black women and white women first married between 1950 and 1970. Results, using multivariate proportional hazards models, indicate that (1) premarital births, but not premarital pregnancies, increase the risk of marital dissolution; (2) an increasing age at the first marriage reduces the risk of marital separation and divorce, but not monotonically; (3) blacks differ from whites in that they are less responsive to the effects of a premarital birth or a young age at first marriage in increasing the likelihood of marital instability; and (4) an older age a first marriage offsets somewhat the destabilizing effects of a premarital birth.Keywords
This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
- Family History and the Life CourseJournal of Family History, 1977
- An Economic Analysis of Marital InstabilityJournal of Political Economy, 1977
- Age at Marriage as a Mobility Contingency: Estimates for the Nye-Berardo ModelJournal of Marriage and Family, 1977
- Premarital Pregnancy and Marital InstabilityJournal of Social Issues, 1976
- Differentials in Marital Instability: 1970American Sociological Review, 1972
- Income and Family Events: Marital StabilityJournal of Marriage and Family, 1971
- Life Plans and Marriage Age: An Application of Path AnalysisJournal of Marriage and Family, 1969
- Early Dating and Early MarriageJournal of Marriage and Family, 1968
- Timing of first pregnancy as a factor in divorce: A cross‐cultural analysisEugenics Quarterly, 1963
- Studies in Child Spacing: III--Premarital Pregnancy as a Factor in DivorceAmerican Sociological Review, 1953