BOWLING GREEN, O.—Rapid changes in family structure in recent decades, including increases in the percentage of children born out of wedlock and the average age of first marriage, raise important questions about how these trends may impact the health and welfare of individuals, families and communities.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aims to help answer those questions through the formation of a new National Center for Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.
Federal funding for the center is $4.35 million over five years. BGSU is contributing the balance of the $5.5 million budget for the project, which is modeled on the National Poverty Research Center supported by HHS for nearly 40 years.
The idea is to bring researchers and policymakers together, as well as to learn leading practices in marriage education and train the next generation of marriage scholars, explains Dr. Susan Brown, the center’s co-director and an associate professor of sociology at Bowling Green.
“Marriage is a hot topic,” says Brown, who has studied cohabitation among other family demography issues. “People are interested in families,” she says, because they wonder if their experiences are similar to others’.
“The American family is complicated, and a lot of children are experiencing a diverse set of families,” notes Dr. Wendy Manning, the other co-director and a sociology professor at BGSU. And as families have become increasingly complex, Brown adds, researchers are “racing to keep up,” addressing such questions as how diverse living arrangements affect individual well-being and what divorce and remarriage mean for children and adults.
While the U.S. divorce rate has leveled off at about 50 percent—static since the early 1980s—other aspects of marriage have not stayed the same. The average ages of first-time American newlyweds have risen steadily since the 1950s, reaching current, historic highs of 27 for men and 25 for women. At the same time, the percentage of U.S. children born out of wedlock has reached 38 percent, and more than 40 percent of those children are born to cohabiting couples.
“Marriage is changing, so it is a moving target,” says Manning, pointing out that the level of teen fertility is as high as it was in the ‘50s, but those babies of 50 years ago were born to married teens. “The shotgun marriage,” as Brown puts it, “has been replaced by shotgun cohabitation.”
“Family structure plays a critical role in the well-being of children and families," says Melissa Pardue, deputy assistant secretary for human services policy at HHS. "The National Center for Marriage Research will help us determine why healthy marriages are so important and what we can do to further promote them. Just as important, it will ensure the future of high-quality marriage research by training a new generation of scholars and building strong research capacity."
In addition to the relationship between family structure and well-being, the center’s researchers—including other scholars from BGSU and elsewhere—will look at how family processes and resources mediate that relationship; factors associated with formation and maintenance of healthy marriages/relationships; how adolescents make the transition to healthy marriages; pathways of family formation outside marriage and how those families compare with married families, and the roles of marriage education programs in supporting healthy marriages and well-being.
Manning and Brown have previous experience with many of these issues both through their own research and as director and associate director, respectively, of BGSU’s Center for Family and Demographic Research. CFDR incorporates perspectives from various disciplines, just as the marriage research center intends to do.
Six students—two undergraduates, three graduate students and one postdoctoral fellow—will be affiliated with the center, which will also hire three or four staff members and have a 10-member national advisory committee, appointed by the directors and HHS representatives.
Among its many planned activities, the center will conduct workshops, seminars, conferences and small-grant competitions; build a marriage-related data and measurement infrastructure, and disseminate research findings by various means, including a Web site.