family quiz

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.

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

Alexis Abdulian

498

            The first article is titled "Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race 1973 to 2006" by Mamadi Corra, Shannon K. Carter, J. Scott Carter, and David Knox. The data used in the study was from the General Social Survey. The surveys were conducted from 1972 to 1994 and from 1973 to 2006. The dependent variable in this study is a question about how the person views their marriage. The responses they could give were not too happy, pretty happy, or very happy. They got a score depending on what their response was. The independent variables of the study were social location measure, employment, divorced or not divorced, whether the person has a child under 18, age, education, income, and religion/how religious someone is. Their study compares the marriage of whites versus blacks. The first figure shows that both white wives and white husbands reported a higher happiness level with their marriage compared to black husbands and wives. White husbands had the highest happiness rate, followed by white wives. Black husbands also reported more happiness than their wives. The first table shows that if they have a higher work status and have a child in their home that the status of marital happiness is a lot lower. Those who had higher incomes, educated spouses, and went to church often had a high level of marital happiness. The 75-and-older age group reported high marital happiness, and the highest marital happiness age group was 18-24. They concluded that race and gender have a high effect on marital happiness.

            The second article is titled "A Path Toward Interracial Marriage: Women's First Partners and Husbands across Racial Lines" by Rosalind Berkowitz King. This research was done using the data form the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth. The sample was of women from the ages of 15-44. They selected the race groups that had a minimum of 100 people observed. The races used were: White, Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic American Indian/Alaskan Native, Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black, and Non-Hispanic White. For those who responded that they were mixed race they received a 1, and those who said they weren't received a 0. They were asked about their first sex partner's race and their first husband's race. Other variables were parent's education, religious affiliation, how well they know English, and nativity. Age was another factor looked at, as well as geography. There are two dependent variables focused on in this study. The first variable was if their first partner was of a different race than they are. The second was if their first husband was a different race than they are. Non-Hispanic White women are one of the highest rates to marry within their own race according to the article. They also found that women that had college-educated parents are almost equally interracially married and never married, 30% and 31%. Those who married their first partner are two years younger than those women who married within their race.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

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.

King, R., & Bratter, J. (2007). A PATH TOWARD INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE: Women's First Partners and Husbands across Racial Lines. Sociological Quarterly, 48(2), 343-369.

Savanna Pacifico

Word Count: 498

Soc 111 MWF 10_10:50 am

Family

In the article "Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender & Race, 1973 to 2006", a team of researchers, Corra, Carter S., Carter J., and Knox, wanted to find out what kind of an impact gender and race would have on couple's marital statuses from the years 1973 to 2006 (Corra, Carter J., Carter S., & Knox, 2009). They gathered their data through the General Social Survey. While the research team focuses much of their attention on the race and gender of their participant they also found that church attendance, income as well as education was also a contributing factor in marital happiness through time (Corra, Carter J., Carter S., & Knox, 2009). Their result showed that white husbands reported the most happiness in their marriage compared to white wives and black wives and husbands. The black wives described the lowest reports of marital happiness. From the beginning of this study in 1973 to the conclusion of this study in 2006 the black wives' responses of happiness significantly increased, narrowing the gap between all the genders and races of participants. Whereas white wives' responses of marital happiness showed a progressive decrease from 1970 to the 2000's (Corra, Carter J., Carter S., & Knox, 2009). My perspective of white wives reporting a decrease in marital happiness may be greatly influenced by historical events that have occurred between 1970's to 2000's. Looking back on America, white women were generally confined to the household. It was believed that their duty was to their husband, and if their husbands were happy then they were too. Much has changed since then, women strive for independence and are more likely to speak their minds. I would assume that a woman this day and age is more open to addressing the imperfections in their marriage than they would have 20 years ago, but only additional research can accurately prove this.

Furthering the research on race and marriage, in their article "A Path Toward Interracial Marriage: Women First Partners and Husbands Across Racial Lines", researchers Rosalind King, and Jennifer Bratter, wanted to discover the relationship between the race of women's first sexual partner as well as the race of their future husbands (King & Bratter, 2007). In doing so, King, and Bratter gathered their data through the National Survey of Family Growth. Responses from 9,216 women ages 15-44 were used in this study (King & Bratter, 2007). They examined the female participant's race, religious affiliation, parent's education, and region of birth to help determine the potential influence on their marital partners' race. They found that Non-Hispanic Asian, Hispanic white, Hispanic American Indian women we more likely to have intimate interracial relationships, whereas Non-Hispanic white and Non-Hispanic black women were not. NHB women were more likely to marry the same race as their first sexual partner, but least likely to intermarry. Overall, they found that those who interracially married had experienced other sexual partners, whereas those who married their first sexual partner were least likely to intermarry. The idea behind this research is that women who have sex with someone of a different race share an accepting perception on race and international relationship, and would be more acceptable to the idea of themselves being in an interracial marriage (King & Bratter, 2007). 

Jessica Vang

Jessica Vang Words: 378

One of the article I choose was "Black/White Interracial Marriage Trends." In this article the methods I found was that the author uses a 5 percent sample from the latest census and with that he identifies the marriages within the household. Marriage license were not a must, so it was difficult to identify each marriage or trace the marriages. On table 1 you can see age limit are separated and identify by the year. Out of the census sample you can see in 1850 about 1 percent of the sample has about 6,775 only 4 were interracial marriage. Compare that to 1920 we can see same percentage sample of 35,969, 14 were interracial marriage. Now compare that to 2000 the sample percentage raised to 5 percent and about 203,018, over 3,570 are interracial marriage which is a total difference from the 1850 to 2000. This is only the age range of 20 to 30 years of age we are talking about. Overall, we can see that the large sample size has a very small number of interracial couples.

Another article I choose was the "Hispanic Families: Stability and Change." In this article I found that they focus on the three issues that focuses on their analysis. Hispanic origin, Hispanic subgroups, and changes over time. One of the issue is the shift of self-identification for the determination of Hispanic descent. Another issue is the changes over time in the birthrates for Hispanics. In 1980 in 22 states, 90 percent has an origin of Hispanic mother birth certificate. As we can see on Table 1, the last column shows a percentage of 1980-2000 in early marriage of 20-24 that has been declining in all groups, including the subgroups of Hispanics. Overall the Hispanics experienced weak declines in fertility in the teen years over the past two decades than any other groups. Then as we proceed to the 2000s there are high teen birthrates for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, according to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth that possibility they're going to give birth before the age of 20 for Hispanics. In conclusion Hispanic families in the United States have changed throughout the year and there are more subgroups that helps identify more than just Hispanics. 

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Jessica Vang

Sara Greenlee

Family Quiz

The required article this week, was entitled, "Trends in Marital Happiness by Gender and Race, 1973 to 2006" by Mamadi Corra, Shannon K. Carter, J. Scott Carter, and David Knox. This article evaluates marital happiness from 1973 to 2006, and whether or not gender and race are big determinants in how happy married couples are. The methods used to evaluate marital happiness included looking at data from the General Social Survey, ranging from the years 1973 to 2006. All data surveyed 18 or older, English speaking participants in the United States. The dependent variable included asking participants to describe their marriage, with responses for the question being very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy. The independent variable being that of participants' genders and races, specifically looking at White husbands and wives and, Black husbands and wives. As for the results of this article, the authors concluded that males are happiest in their marriages, while Black wives are the unhappiest. The authors also found if participants have these factors in their marriage, their happiness levels are highest: high incomes, highly educated, and attend church frequently. As for the article of my choosing, I chose to evaluate, "Whom Do Immigrants Marry? Emerging Patterns of Intermarriage and Integration in the United States" by Daniel T. Lichter, Zhenchao Qian, and Dmitry Tu.

"Whom Do Immigrants Marry? Emerging Patterns of Intermarriage and Integration in the United States" evaluates the whom exactly do immigrants marry, specifically looking at the United States, and its patterns of intermarriage and integration. To evaluate who immigrants marry, the authors of this article looked at data from the ACS, ranging from the years 2008-2012, specifically looking at 86, 124 native and immigrant couples in that time frame. The results of this article being that marriages between U.S. natives and immigrants has increased over time, with gender and race playing a key part in this. An example of this would be that most native born Asian men marrying Asian women, whereas most native born Black men marry outside of their race. For women, Blacks chose to marry foreign Blacks, while native born Hispanic men were more likely than native born Black men to marry White women.  Overall, it was concluded that in today's society, a large share of U.S. marriages results in marrying immigrants, roughly one in six.