Silvia Nieto

In the article Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, the authors talk about the amount of divorces and a decline in marriage rates. They mention how marital happiness varies in quality depending on the gender and race of individuals. They look into the impact of both gender and race on how marital happiness is and changes overtime. In order to asses this, they used data from a 1973-2006 General Social Survey where they were able to get a random drawn nationally representative sample of adults that spoke English. These individuals were all at the age of 18 and older and lived in non institutional places within the United States. They were asked questions such as how would they describe their marriage and given the following choices; very happy, pretty happy, or not to happy. In their findings, they were able to see that Whites as well as husbands disclose that they have a higher marital happiness as compared to wives and Blacks. Within Black and White husbands and wives, we were able to see that Black wives detailed the lowest level of marital happiness as where White husbands had the highest. Even though we see that White husbands have the highest marital happiness, all throughout the years of 1970 to 2000, there has been a slight decline amongst all four groups. What was most remarkable from the changes throughout the years were that Black wives had a significant rise in marital happiness as compared to the other groups. As for white wives, marital happiness has not improved during the time period studied.

In the article Whom Do Immigrants Marry? Emerging Patterns of Intermarriage and Integration in the United States, the authors study intermarriages amongst immigrants in the United States. They are trying to find out if immigrants marry natives and if this is the case, they further their investigation and try to discover if they marry white natives, coethnic natives or other natives. In order to get their results, they use data from an American Community Survey (ACS) from the years 2008 through 2012 which helps them take demographic stock of patterns of contemporary intermarriages. They take down the marriages among foreign born individuals and native population over the period of 2008 and 2012. They also study the variation the intermarriage with foreigners and natives between panethnic groupings. They ask people both natives and foreign born if they marry each other rather than whites or the minority population. Another thing they do is evaluate if differences in foreign born intermarriage population is based on ethnicity, race, national origin, preference, etc. When coming down with the results, it was indicated that about 1 in 6 marriages that had formed in the year previous included an immigrant. It was also seen that more than half of the marriages involved a partner that was native. Implications are that assimilations in marriages are important but are changing part of the social integration and incorporation. White immigrants are most likely to marry natives, especially whites compared to black immigrants. Black immigrants are less likely than other immigrant groups to step into ethnic and racial lines or marry black natives. Also, intermarriage was highly linked to social integration such as education, the amount of time in the country, etc.

Corra, M., Carter, S. K., Carter, J. S., & Knox, D. (2009). Trends in marital happiness by gender and race, 1973 to 2006. Journal of Family Issues,30(10), 1379-1404.

Lichter, D., Qian, Z., & Tumin, D. (2015). Whom Do Immigrants Marry? Emerging Patterns of Intermarriage and Integration in the United States. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 662, 57.