Romantic-Relationship Experiences in the Emerging Adulthood and Later Marriage Behavior

Janet Chen-Lan Kuo , National Taiwan University
I-Chien Chen, Michigan State University

Using data from the three waves (1,3,4) of the Add Health, the current study examines 1) what may feature the relationship experience in the emerging adulthood years; 2) whether and how individuals’ late-teen and early-adulthood relationship experiences vary by one’s socioeconomic background; 3) whether the relationship experience in the emerging adulthood years is related to the risk of marriage by early 30s. Employing the latent class analysis, the preliminary results show that young people who were more likely than the others to experience or attribute the cause of a dissolved relationship to “divergent expectations” seem to be more socioeconomically advantaged. And the multivariate logistic model shows that these people are more likely than their peers to marry by early 30s, net of socioeconomic background and other related factors. We argue that the findings may help reveal the underlying processes behind the well-documented socioeconomic divergences in family formation.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 4. Marriage, Family, Households, & Unions