Using data from six waves of the Study of Marital Instability over the Life Course (N = 1,998), we conducted a latent class analysis to test for distinct marital happiness trajectories. We found three distinct marital happiness trajectories: low, middle, and high happiness. Initial levels of life happiness were strongly associated with membership in the marital happiness trajectories and with various demographic and attitude-related control variables. Using fixed effects regression with time-varying covariates, we also found that marital happiness trajectory membership was associated with subsequent changes in both life happiness and depressive symptoms. All respondents experienced a decrease in life happiness between Wave 1 and the end of their observed time in their marriage, but respondents in the high marital happiness trajectory experienced the smallest decline. Respondents in both the high and middle marital happiness trajectories also experienced a decline in depressive symptoms across time. Intervention and policy implications are discussed.
Research on same-sex relationships has informed policy debates and legal decisions that greatly affect American families, yet the data and methods available to scholars studying same-sex relationships have been limited. In this article the authors review current approaches to studying same-sex relationships and significant challenges for this research. After exploring how researchers have dealt with these challenges in prior studies, the authors discuss promising strategies and methods to advance future research on same-sex relationships, with particular attention given to gendered contexts and dyadic research designs, quasi-experimental designs, and a relationship biography approach. Innovation and advances in the study of same-sex relationships will further theoretical and empirical knowledge in family studies more broadly and increase understanding of different-sex as well as same-sex relationships.
Using data from Wave 4 (2008) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 7,466), we examine potential consequences of black exceptionalism in the context of interracial relationships among nonblack respondents. While increasing racial diversity and climbing rates of interracial unions have fostered the notion that racial boundaries within the United States are fading, our results add to the accumulating evidence that racial/ethnic boundaries persist in U.S. society. Results suggest that among non-Black respondents there is more stigma and disapproval attached to relationships with Blacks than there are to relationships with members of other racial/ethnic groups. Specifically, our results indicate that nonblack individuals with black partners have significantly more depressive symptoms and less relationship satisfaction than their counterparts with nonblack partners, regardless of respondent race and whether the nonblack partner is the same versus a different race from the respondent. Further, the relationship between partner race and depressive symptoms is partially and significantly mediated by relationship satisfaction.
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