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Data from the National Survey of Families and Households for 1987-1988 are used to explore methodological and substantive issues concerning marital dissolution in the United States. "The analysis finds that marital disruptions are seriously underreported by males, making the analysis of male marital histories problematic. Also, the potential impact of reconciliations on the estimates of recent marital disruption based on separation is explored; no upward bias is likely to result from the inclusion of separations that may subsequently reconcile. The impact of a wide variety of factors on the risk of marital disruption is examined using proportional hazard techniques. Among them are included parental background factors, respondent's characteristics at the time of marriage, differences in spouses' characteristics, and joint activity statuses of marital partners in the first year of marriage. The risk of marital disruption is highest among women with young age at marriage, low education, a cohabitation history, and those whose spouse has been married previously. Parental family disruption affects marital stability primarily through age at marriage and cohabitation. Religious and educational heterogamy and male unemployment reduce marital stability."

Data from the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households are used to provide national estimates of cohabitation trends and levels. The rapid increase since around 1970 is documented over both birth cohorts and marriage cohorts. Almost half of the persons in their early 30s and half of the recently married have cohabited. Changes in the proportion ever married are compared with changes in the proportion who have either married or cohabited. Much of the decline in marriage has been offset by increased living together without being married. The stability of unions of various types is compared. Cohabitations end very quickly in either marriage or disruption. About 60 percent of all first cohabitations result in marriage. Cohabiting unions and marriages preceded by cohabitation are much more likely to break up than are unions initiated by marriage. Multivariate analysis reveals higher rates of cohabitation among women, whites, persons who did not complete high school, and those from families who received welfare or who lived in a single-parent family while growing up.

Divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and cohabitation are reshaping family experience in the United States. Because of these changes, our traditional definitions of families decreasingly capture of the social units of interest. We have noted how a significant proportion of officially defined single-parent families actually are two-parent unmarried families. The present paper expands on this perspective with respect to stepfamilies. We must broaden our definition of stepfamilies to include cohabitations involving a child of only one partner, and must recognize the large role of nonmarital childbearing in the creation of stepfamilies. We find that cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing have been important aspects of stepfamily experience for at least two decades, and that this is increasingly so. To define stepfamilies only in terms of marriage clearly underestimates both the level and the trend in stepfamily experience: when cohabitation is taken into account, about two-fifths of all women and 30% of all children are likely to spend some time in a stepfamily.