Family Quiz

This week the topic to dig deeper in and see how races effect was families. One of the articles I chose was, Are Same-Sex and Single Adoptive Parents More Likely to Adopt Transracially? A National Analysis of Race, Family Structure, and the Adoption Marketplace. This study looked over a sample of 63,681 adoptive households. These households were white married, single, divorced, and same sex couples to see if there was a significance between relationship status and choosing a transracial child to adopt. They based it off of a reading on child adoption to see if family dynamics and race of families are taken into consideration in the pairing within the adoption process. This study found that the more "untraditional" family setting such as same-sex couples and single parents are the most likely to adopt a transracial child. Transracial meaning a child who is not white. Although white families generally are more likely to adopt Hispanic or Asian children, overall white single and same-sex parents are the most likely to adopt an African American child. The findings showed how significant different family units are affected even in adoption selection by "market forces". The second article I read for this week was titled, "Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race". This article was to measure marital happiness over time in regards to race and gender. They compared the happiness between four groups; white husbands, white wives, black husbands, and black wives. In order to evaluate the study they had a random sample of 24,455 English speaking married adults to take a survey asking questions that took answers of levels of happiness, such as very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy. Within these questions they were able to find out many other factors in these recipients lives such as age, education, income, and spouse occupation all things that can factor into a couple's happiness. When looking at the breakdown of the respondents there was a much higher percentage of white opposed to black. They found that blacks overall were less happy than the white couples. In the mean white husbands showed to have the highest level of marital happiness. Sadly on the other hand they found that black wives showed the lowest level of marital happiness. The findings showed that both race and gender played a part in the significance of marital happiness. They hope to see in other studies maybe the reasonings behind the data found from this survey, but the researchers are sure that over time the findings from this survey's results will change not only by race but also by gender because of the natural changes in nature and structure of marriages.

Ashley Meneses: 444