Alexia. Jimenez-Carrillo Family Quiz

Alexia Jimenez-Carrillo

Word count: 525

In the article, Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, 1973 to 2006, the dependent variable is how happy are you married. The questions that were asked were all revolving around how happy the individual was with their marriage. The two races that were surveyed were Blacks and whites. They also tracked their gender, work, marital status, education, age, income, and religion. They also asked if they had any children under the age of 18 and used it for their data, the highest scores were given to people who answered greater happiness, and the least scores were the people who were the least happy. This study focuses on the years 1973-2006 data of the GSS.

            It was found that everyone but white wives were happier than before. They were getting happier as time progressed. There was a slighjkmt decrease in the years 70-90's, but everyone went back up right after that except white wives. White husbands are happier than Black wives and husbands. Black wives are slightly higher than black husbands. It was found that husbands tend to be happier than wives. The gap between husbands and wife's happiness is closing. This does not mean that it is closing because husbands are less happy, but because black wives are just getting happier. It was not clearly shown the reason for the happiness in black wives. There needs to be further research to explain why these changes have happened. So far, the best guess is that over the years, marriages have evolved and changed which has made more people happy except for white wives. White men are happier because of the power that they still have.

In the article, Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage, the goal was to conduct a survey to figure out if there were changes or new ideas about intermarriage sampling different races. The way that this study was conducted was from IPUMS data and the Census data from 1990 to 2000. This study was done with multi races such as: Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians. It wasn't until the year 2000 that people were allowed to claim more than just one race.  They try to pin point how those same individuals reported themselves as in 1990 to try to keep the data as accurate as possible. The census no longer asks about when the individual first got married. It only includes currently married couple, therefore that could tamper with the actual findings. The way that this study controls this is by only including young couple of ages 20-34 to avoid the older couple who might have already experienced divorce. Only opposite sex marriages are included in this survey.

It was found that intermarriage was the lowest or least likely to happen with whites, and the highest with American Indians. White men and women were the least likely to intermarry, then it was African American men and women, the next group would be Hispanic men and women, then Asian American men and women, and the most likely to intermarry were American Indian men and women in both 1990 and 2000. All races had more intermarriages in the year 2000 than in 1990. As the years go by, intermarriage is more common among all races.