Nahma Alfarah

Nahma Alfarah

539 words

The article, Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, 1973 to 2006, by Mamadi Corra, Shannon K. Carter, J. Scott Carter, and David Knox, talks about how race and gender plays a major role in marital happiness. The methods of this research is that they used the General Social Survey to survey adults 18 and older about their happiness in their marriage. This is known as the dependent variable and the answers choices for this question was very happy, pretty happy, and not too happy. The independent variables asked was if there had a child under the age of age living in their household. They anaylsis family income and educational level of the spouses. As a result, studies indicate that white husbands are happier in their marital status than white wives. On the other hand, white wives are generally happier than married black males and black females and black males tend to happier than black females. Even though married black female status of happiness has gone up over the years, they still score low compared to white males and females and black males. Now what may contribute to these findings?  The dependent variables that have a significant effect on these findings is year. As decades go by, the level of our happiness tends to decrease. As we see in our following results, race has a significant effect in happiness. Whites tend to be more happier than blacks in their marriage. The independent variable on whether they had a child under the age of 18 resulted in lower marriage happiness. Also, they mention that the better job you have, the more likely you are unhappy in your marriage. Lastly income and religious contributed to having a higher level of happiness in their marriage.  As it goes to show, a majority of the factors that lead to stress can be reasons why marriage are very unhappy.  

The second article, Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage, by Zhenchao Qian and Daniel T. Lichter, talks about how intermarriage is a huge factor to assimilating into western society. The methods of this article uses a study shown from the Integrated Public Use Microdata. They look at the censuses that is between 1990 and 2000 showing that there is more intermarriage happening. The results indicate that the reason for this is because we have an increase of bi racial population. Due to this, people with different backgrounds, bi racial people tend to marry whites since white is the superior dominant group. The race that are more likely to marry whites are Hispanics and Native Americans. We see a slight increase in blacks and whites but not a significant amount. Blacks are more likely to not marry whites. Another aspect they talk about is immigrants born in another countries and citizens. We see that there is a decline between these two groups intermarrying one another, which portrays the idea that intermarriage is not common in the United States. Lastly we see that asian americans and hispanic americans are not many immigrant as they used too. We see a lower rate of that happening. As it goes to show, intermarriage tends to increase when we see a bi racial population.