Megan Dudley soc 111 family quiz

Megan Dudley, 460 words

The article entitled, "Race, Ethnicity, and the Changing Context of Childbearing in the United States"  basically shows that overtime there has been a large decrease in  child bearing particularly in the  Unites States. This is consistent when looking at different age groups across the board. There really is only some variation when looking at the older age groups. Generally, in the U.S. younger people are having significantly less children than possibly in prior years, because they want to have a stable job as well as income before having children. When looking at families, there is still a substantial difference among ethnicities. For example there is still a large gap between whites and blacks having babies before the age of twenty. Fertilely rate is twice as high in black and hispanic women than white women. There is also a big difference in marries hispanic and white women increasing their child bearing rates in both races. There is also a change in people living together and having aa child without being married. In both ethnicity, white and hispanic, have increased. The authors looked at possible explanations of why this is occurring including things like contraceptive use, economic disadvantages, availability of birth control, relationships, etc. 

  The next article discusses more about marriage. The article, "Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, 1973 to 2006" really emphasized the question of "How would you describe your marriage?" with answers including: Not too happy, happy, etc. The authors looked at a general social survey done during the years 2000-2006.  The authors ultimately looked at subjects' race and gender, work status, whether they have been divorced, whether they have kids in the home that are under eighteen. They also looked at religion, education, age, income, spouse income, as well as the year the survey was conducted.this study shows that white husbands are the overall most happy in their marriages, or that they have high rates of happiness in their marriages. In other words, they are satisfied, or content. The pattern follows with white wives below the white husbands, next would be black husbands, followed by black wives, being at the low end of the happy scale. There is a small decrease overtime, people are becoming less happy throughout the years. This excludes black wives, as they are becoming more happy. Essentially the results are starting to even each other out. Black husbands, white wives, and white husbands generally get less happy with balances the black wives becoming increasingly more happy. The authors analyze that race, gender, work status,and education proved to be very important in the explanation of why certain people are more happy in their marriages than others.Usually, if you are unemployed you are happier, also children often can make impacts on marriages and make it harder to work out issues, as well as religion can have an affect.