Ten Years of Marriage and Cohabitation Research in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues
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REVIEW
Ten Years of Marriage and Cohabitation Research in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues Jeffrey Dew1 Accepted: 3 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract I reviewed the 36 marriage and cohabitation studies from the Journal of Family and Economic Issues articles published between 2010–2019. Nearly all of the studies used quantitative methods, and two-thirds of them used publicly available nationally-representative data. The studies fell into roughly five, unevenly sized groups: family structure, relationship quality, division of labor/employment, money management, and an “other” category. Suggestions for future research include applying some of the important questions within the articles to underrepresented groups, further examining the process of how finances and relationship quality interrelate and doing more applied and translational research. Keywords Cohabitation · Financial distress · Financial issues · Marriage Financial issues and adult romantic relationships interface in many important ways. Whether in marriage or cohabitation, living with a romantic partner may modify how one approaches financial issues (e.g., Kenney 2004). This association may work in the other direction, too; financial issues may influence relationship quality (see Dew 2016 for a review). Although many scholars study marriage and cohabitation, few of them study these couples within the financial contexts that surround them or the financial aspects that may influence the relationship processes themselves. The Journal of Family and Economic Issues, therefore, is a key outlet where scholars can publish studies that explore the nexus of financial issues and adult romantic relationships. This review focuses on the 36 studies of marriage and cohabitation from 2010–2019 in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues. The editor/editorial staff of JFEI assigned these studies to me. In the first section, I provide a synopsis of the articles that I reviewed. In the second section, I This is one of several papers published together in Journal of Family and Economic Issueson the "Special Issue on Virtual Decade in Review". * Jeffrey Dew [email protected] 1
Brigham Young University, 2101 JFSB, Provo, UT 84606, USA
discuss the future research directions that might further build this topic. For the purposes of this review, I define marriage as two adults whose union has been legally recognized by a state entity. Cohabitation, by way of contrast, generally denotes two unmarried persons living together in a sexual union.1
Synopsis Social norms and behaviors regarding family structure have shifted over the past 60 years. For example, 30% of all US households with children present were single-parent households in 2019 (United States Census Bureau 2020). In 1960, the comparable statistic was 9%. Furthermore, an analysis of US data from 2011–2015 suggested that around 16% of people aged 18–44 cohabited during that time (Nugent and Daugherty 2018). Comparable statistics for 1960 do not exist.
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