Sources of Change and Stability in Low-Income Black Marriages

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

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Abstract

Although black married couples have a substantially greater risk of divorcing within ten years (47%) than whites (32%) or Hispanics (34%), this elevated risk is not evenly distributed within the population. Among families with an annual household income greater than $50,000, the risk that a marriage will end in the first 10 years is actually the same for black and white couples (23%;Bramlett &Mosher, 2002). Rather, the unique vulnerabilities of black couples are observed in . Within these communities, the comparison between the marital outcomes of blacks and Hispanics, two similarly underprivileged minority groups, is especially striking. Among families with an annual household income less than $25,000, for example, 65% of all first marriages of black couples are expected to end in divorce within 10 years, compared to 36% of Hispanic couples at the same income level (Bramlett &Mosher, 2002). These high rates of marital dissolution are evidence of more than a low threshold for ending marriages among black couples;black marriages are experienced as significantly less satisfying than the marriages of comparable Hispanics as well (Broman, 2005;Goodwin, 2003; Karney, Garvan, &Thomas, 2003). Combined with high rates of unmarried parenthood, the cumulative consequences of marital disruptions have devastated black communities. For example, in the 2000 United States Census, only 45% of black households contain a married couple, in contrast to 70% of Hispanic households. Recognizing this problem, the federal government has begun to invest unprecedented amounts of money - including $750 million over the next five years - in programs intended to strengthen marriage in low-income populations, with a portion of those funds to be allocated toward an African American Healthy Marriage Initiative. The vast disparity in marital outcomes between blacks and Hispanics at comparable levels of socioeconomic status indicates that black and Hispanic couples differ significantly in ways that are not captured by a narrow focus on economic issues. Yet most of what is known about marriage among black and Hispanic couples derives fromsociological and demographic research assessing economic and structural constraints on family formation and dissolution (e.g., lack of flexible time, lack of employment opportunities). A separate line of work in psychology addresses relationship maintenance processes (e.g., conflict resolution, social support, cognitive strategies), but this work has been conducted almost exclusively on white, middle-income, relatively well-educated couples. Despite the fact that psychological research on marriages and families has seldom been conducted with non-white, non-middle class samples, it is this work that informs the programs currently being considered for implementation among low-income black and Hispanic couples. In the absence of research on relationship maintenance in these couples, current efforts to strengthen low-income marriages may be inefficient or even misguided. To pursue this goal, marriage licenses will be used to sample 250 first-married black newlywed couples living in low-income neighborhoods. Guided by a model that explicitly addresses the unique experiences of black couples and accounts for individual histories, contextual influences, and interpersonal processes, assessments will include interview-based self-reports of personal history, experiences of racism, marital quality, census data on neighborhood characteristics, videotape bservations of marital interactions, and interviewer ratings of the home environment. Recently married couples will be assessed in their homes 2 times over nine months. . lower-income communities The overarching goal of the proposed research is to examine the antecedents and correlates of marital outcomes within the first year of marriage in low-income black couples. Doing so addresses the gap between the applied need to understand marriage among low-income black couples on one hand, and the lack of basic scientific research on this population on the other. These data will be combined with data from an ongoing study of low-income Hispanic newlyweds in order to identify the sources of differences in marital outcomes for these two similarly underprivileged groups