Marcos Iraheta

Marriage has been an institution that has been around for a long period of time and while different cultures have used it for different reasons, happiness within a marriage is a factor that is not usually looked at. This undoubtedly varies by race and for different reasonings, as different couples expect different things from one another.

Mamadi Corra, Shannon Carter, J. Scott Carter and David Knox took a look at this in their study for Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race and discovered some significant findings. They used the General Social Survey and looked at trends from 1976 to 2006 for their research, using English-speaking adults in the United States that were living in noninstitutional facilities. They used data from 23 years' worth of questions, but broke it down into decades, with the dependent variable being the question that was asked: "Taken things all together, how would you describe your marriage." They also broke down the data to look at black and white husbands and wives, to see how they responded across time, using various independent factors like divorce, work status, age, education and income. Among the four groups they looked at, they found that black wives had the least levels of satisfaction in the time span and white husbands to have the most, meaning they were the happiest. Interestingly, they found black wives to have a significant jump in their level of happiness from the 1990's and 2000's, with more research being needed to asses why this happened. As far as white wives, their levels have not increased since the 1970's and black husband rates have decreased slightly since then.

In a study done by Zhenchao Qian and Daniel Lichter titled Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage, they looked at interracial marriages and how the trend has changed over the course of the past few decades. They used data from Integrated Public Use Microdata in the 1990 and 2000 census to distinguish between races and used currently married couples ages 20-34 for their study. They also limited marriages to people who migrated to the U.S. before age 20, to further differentiate marriages that may have happened overseas. Furthermore, they took a look at cohabitation patterns for couples in the same age range, excluding homosexual partnerships, to not complicate the study. Their findings saw that it was hard to determine very specific trends because of the re-classification of races in the 2000 census, though intermarriage between blacks and whites went unaffected during this period. African-Americans were actually the least likely to marry Whites, determined by their findings. Hispanics have the highest rates to intermarry with whites at every level of the study, with Asian Americans not too far behind. The only difference was in the level of education, which made Asian American rates higher. The more educated they were, the more they seemed to marry whites. This means that social mobility gave more opportunities to Asians and Hispanics to date and marry whites. American Indians also showed a high level of marital assimilation, according to their studies.