Relationship satisfaction of Mexican American and non-Hispanic white American interethnic couples: issues of acculturation and clinical intervention

Despite the increasing prevalence of interethnic marriages, remarkably little empirical literature exists for guiding clinical interventions offered to these couples. This study compared the marriages of 72 couples with one Mexican-American partner and one non-Hispanic White American partner, 75 Mexican-American couples, and 66 non-Hispanic White couples. Overall, the interethnic couples were more similar to non-Hispanic White couples than they were to Mexican-American couples across multiple domains, with the latter group indicating modestly higher levels of relationship distress. Among interethnic couples, Mexican-American wives' level of acculturation related significantly to both their own marital- and parental-role orientation and to distress in their relationships with children, as well as to their husbands' marital distress regarding child rearing and the couple's interactions regarding finances. Implications for clinical interventions with Mexican- and White-American interethnic couples are discussed.     

Addressing Concerns with Lesbian Couples Experiencing Fertility Treatment: Using Relational Cultural Theory

Legal changes and increasing research surrounding the positive influence of lesbian parenting have spurred a resulting increase in lesbian couples pursuing parenting through various fertility measures. Increasing counselors' multicultural competence regarding the experiences unique to the lesbian population with fertility will strengthen the counseling process when working with lesbian couples interested in adding children to their family. Through the lens of relational cultural theory, this article uses the constructs of mutuality, empathy, and reciprocity to provide counseling implications for work with lesbian couples during the decision making and stressful process of fertility treatment, while focusing on strengthening the relationship.     

Single motherhood and children's health

This analysis employs the recently released Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (hispanic HANES) and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey II (NHANES) to determine the effect of a mother's marital status on her report of her child's health for Mexican-American, black, and non-Hispanic white children aged 6 months to 11 years. The results reveal that single mothers report poorer overall physical health for their children than do mothers in intact marriages. Several social and cultural factors, including marital status, acculturation, and income, affect the accuracy of mother's assessments. The analysis also documented the extensive dependence of single mothers, especially minority-group mothers, on public programs. In summary, a mother's report of her child's health is the result of a complex interaction of cultural, demographic, and social class factors. This analysis revealed that marital status operates differently for 3 racial and ethnic groups, and that poverty and the stresses associated with single motherhood decrease levels of reported health for children. Analysis of a matched sample of Mexican-American children and their mothers revealed that, net of physician's assessment of a child's health, a mother's depression score is among the most significant predictors of her assessment of her child's health.     

Fertility,education, and social change

Level of education in India affects the age at marriage, the role of women, the desire to maintain and raise the standard of living, mobility , and cultural values all of which contribute to a couple's motivation to practice birth control. A review of differential fertility studies carried out in different parts of India indicates that generally the level of education and fertility are inversely related. However, the conclusions showing mean fertility at different levels of education are not uniform and this suggests that there is a critical level of education above which self-motivation, the conscious effort at family limitation on the part of the couple, determines the fertility level. Couples with less education may be inspired to practice birth control after reaching a certain parity. In India, level of education, by raising the age of marriage, widening the non-familial role of women, raising the desired standard of living, increasing geographical mobility and inculcating the small family norm, either directly affects fertility or induces the need for a small family. These variables are a direct result of education and operate most effectively upon couples educated at the level of professional and post-graduate degrees. The small family norm can also be instilled in couples with secondary and college levels of education and family planning will be practiced after the desired number of children is reached. Both self-motivation and sustained motivation are almost absent in couples with only primary or less education. Studies indicate that this section of the population will practice birth control only at high parity levels with outside encouragement.     

Hispanic Assimilation and Fertility in New U.S. Destinations

This paper evaluates comparative patterns of fertility in new Hispanic destinations and established gateways using pooled cross‐sectional data from the 2005–2009 microdata files of the American Community Survey. Changing Hispanic fertility provides a useful indicator of cultural incorporation. Analyses show that high fertility among Hispanics has been driven in part by the Mexican origin and other new immigrant populations (e.g., non‐citizens, those with poor English language skills, etc.). However, high fertility rates among Hispanics cannot be explained entirely by sociodemographical characteristics that place them at higher risk of fertility. For 2005–2009, Hispanic fertility rates were 48 percent higher than fertility among whites; they were roughly 25 percent higher after accounting for differences in key social characteristics, such as age, nativity, country of origin, and education. Contrary to most previous findings of spatial assimilation among in‐migrants, fertility rates among Hispanics in new destinations exceeded fertility in established gateways by 18 percent. In the multivariate analyses, Hispanics in new destinations were roughly 10 percent more likely to have had a child in the past year than those living in established gateways. Results are consistent with subcultural explanations of Hispanic fertility and raise new questions about the spatial patterning of assimilation and the formation of ethnic enclaves outside traditional settlement areas.     

Temporal dimensions of the fertility transition: an age-period-cohort analysis of frontier fertility

"This paper evaluates age, period, and cohort effects on marital fertility during onset of the Utah fertility transition (1880-1900). Computerized genealogies are used to derive age-period-cohort fertility rates for 49,842 once-married couples. Age, period and cohort effects on marital fertility are then estimated using Johnson's (1985) relational model. Declining marital fertility in Utah is shown to be explained by both lower fertility levels across periods and increasing age-specific limitation across cohorts. Direct cohort effects on fertility are insignificant. These results are consistent with prior research, and the view that fertility levels were adaptive (in part through birth spacing across ages) to immediate contexts of childbearing while age-specific fertility truncation increased across cohorts (in part through the more general diffusion of contraceptive innovations)."     

Stress from infertility, marriage factors, and subjective well-being of wives and husbands

Stress associated with the inability to have a child is linked to four aspects of marriage and to five dimensions of life quality. Data come from 157 couples who met a standard medical definition for infertility. Wives and husbands were interviewed independently, and most of the following findings apply to both. A causal model suggests that fertility problem stress has direct effects that increase marital conflict and decrease sexual self-esteem, satisfaction with own sexual performance, and frequency of sexual intercourse. Also, fertility problem stress has both direct and indirect effects (via the marriage factors) that decrease evaluations of life-as-a-whole, self-efficacy, marriage, intimacy, and health. The negative effects on life quality are stronger for wives than for husbands. The model suggests that the life quality of couples with fertility problems could be improved if health care providers and couples themselves took steps to reduce such stresses and/or reduce their impact on the marriage factors.     

EXPLAINING PROTESTANT FERTILITY: BELIEF, COMMITMENT, AND HOMOGAMY

Alternative explanations for higher conservative than liberal fertility among white Protestants in the United States emphasize concurrent compositional differences in either (1) social characteristics or (2) doctrine. Previous tests support the doctrine hypothesis but use denominational proxies for beliefs. Using a personal measure of liberaiism-conservatism, I test these hypotheses with data from the 1963 Glock-Stark Northern California Church Member Study. I find little support for either the characteristics or doctrine explanations, even when the analysis is restricted to subsets of couples highly committed to their faith and denominationally homogamous. Further investigation suggests that the regional nature of the Northern California data, and not the measurement of liberalism-conservatism, accounts for the difference in results between this and prior research.     

Reply to Sloan [on proxies for birth control

Sloan (1984) argues that annual changes in marital fertility of Swedish wives aged 35-39 between 1911 and 1974 is not a result of annual changes in the use of birth control, but is due to changes in health conditions that increase or decrease marital fertility. As evidence of the lack of effect of contraceptive practice on fertility Sloan cites a study published in 1916 whose author concluded that contraceptive use or nonuse had no effect on family size. Sloan is unaware of the shroud of ignorance that blinded such research in the distant past. There was no accepted methodology to determine contraceptive effectiveness until the 1930s, and scientists did not know key elemental facts about human reproduction. For example, the relationship of ovulation to the risk of pregnancy was unknown in 1916, and was to remain a mystery for more than a decade thereafter. Sloan's "declining health" explanation of low fertility in the West is merely a variant of an older attempt to explain low fertility as a result of high protein intake. Sloan's view that modern couples do not contracept to reach a desired family size and that changes in family size preference will not affect birth control practice among older (or younger it appears as well) couples seems to us to be an idiosyncratic view at best and directly opposed by all survey research. Couples do contracept most effectively when they are trying to prevent an additional birth. The view that failure of some Western couples to reproductively compensate for their child deaths as explained by poor reproductive health seems to assume that couples in non-Western population do so compensate, but this is wrong. The idea that such bereaved couples should have another child is so insensitive to tragedy as to defy further reply. Sloan's acceptance and use of reports that some couples say they wanted more children than they had ignores massive research findings of unwanted fertility among couples in populations with long histories of birth control practice. Further, it is difficult to have much faith in such responses since about 1/2 the couples in the Whelpton el al. study cited by Sloan also said they were fecund. These responses mean that couples may say that they want more than they actually had, but they deliberately did not have such a large and "ideal" family size because of other factors not considered by Sloan. Since it appears that Sloan was unable to find another authority, he cites a 3 page comment of his own in support of the hypothesis of deteriorating environment. He does not actually empirically link age patterns of chronic disease with fecundity loss; his view also ignores research indicating improved health conditions, at least among US women, after the mid-1930s that increased fecundity and then fertility. Thus, his argument that factors other than voluntary birth control could explain annual change in Swedish marital fertility among older couples is unsupported by empirical evidence. His remarks are also irrelevant to the use made in the author's article concerning marital fertility rates as a proxy for the use of annual birth control change among younger unmarried women. The marital rate varies, as does the illegitimacy rate. Annual increases in marital fertility are related to annual increases in illegitimacy; annual declines in marital rates to annual declines in illegitimacy. Sloan's hypothetical trends in fecundity have no bearing on our empirical study of annual change in Swedish illegitimacy rates. Finally, Sloan's claim that social demographers do not view a changing environment as problematic is unsupported and unjustified.     

Sexual orientation and household financial decisions: evidence from couples in the United States

We analyze how sexual orientation is related to household financial decisions using 2000 US Census data, and find that lesbian couples pay higher annual mortgages relative to house value than do heterosexual or gay couples. We also estimate that cohabiting heterosexuals pay more than their married counterparts. We link this homosexual-specific differential to homeowners’ propensity to save. This differential reflects the gender composition of same-sex households, and their very low fertility, in addition to the precautionary motives increasing cohabiting couples’ propensity to save relative to married ones. Evidence from retirement and social security income of older couples exhibits the same pattern of differentials by sexual orientation and cohabiting status.     

Labor force participation and fertility: a study of married women in Bangladesh

Most researchers support the notion that a direct negative relationship exists between married women's labor force participation and fertility behavior, yet female employment shows no consistent, general relationship with declining fertility at individual and societal levels. Specific conditions under which employment lowers fertility are therefore explored for the case of Bangladesh. The economic, sociological, and world-system theoretical approaches to the relationship and empirical studies in developing countries including Bangladesh are reviewed. 1975-76 Bangladesh Fertility Survey data on births, deaths, nuptiality, and family planning knowledge and practice for 5772 currently married women of 6513 ever married women under 50 sampled are subjected to multivariate analysis for the study. Analysis revealed that women's modern and traditional occupation as well as higher and secondary education significantly lower their fertility, and that higher age, Islamic religion, use of modern contraceptives, and husband's occupation in transitional and modern sectors have significant positive effects on fertility. The correlation between higher fertility and contraceptive use may be due to women's delay in practicing family planning until reaching desired parity and/or high infant mortality driving women to cease practice in order to replace lost offspring. Future research should be conducted with larger samples and also consider occupations of both husbands and wives. Societal attitudes about women's education should be reformed in support of opening rural schools for women. With 90% of women residing in rural areas and women with traditional occupations having lower fertility, more traditional sector opportunities for women in cottage industry and agriculture production are also recommended, and would help balance skewed urban growth and hypertrophication of the tertiary sector. Finally, motivational efforts should be focused upon encouraging younger instead of older married couples to limit fertility.     

Minority Status and Childlessness*

This study applies the Goldscheider-Uhlenberg theory of minority status and fertility to black-white differences in childlessness. It is hypothesized that when integration into dominant societal institutions is impeded, high-status black couples are more likely to be voluntarily childless than comparable white couples. Using census data, the results tend to support this hypothesis, suggesting that among college-educated, high-status couples, blacks delay marriage longer and have higher rates of voluntary childlessness than do white couples. The implications of these findings are discussed and suggestions for further research are noted.     

Matching,marriage, and children: differences across sexual orientations

There are many differences in behavior across couples of different sexual orientations—some well known, others not. We propose a model which explains differences in expected matching behavior, marriage rates, non-child-friendly activities, and fertility, based on different costs of procreation and complementarities between marriage and children. The model predicts that the biological traits of same-sex couples, unlike those of heterosexual couples, should not be correlated—holding constant other household production characteristics. In addition, the model predicts that heterosexuals have a higher probability of having children and getting married, and that childless heterosexuals are less likely to engage in behaviors not complementary with children than childless gays and lesbians. Using two nationally representative probability samples that self-identify sexual orientation, these predictions are confirmed.     

GLOBALIZATION AND KNOWLEDGE HIERARCHY THROUGH THE EYES OF A QUIZ SHOW

The study compares the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire in seven countries – America, Germany, Italy, Russia, Poland, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Through content analysis of 1,888 questions that were collected from 65 programs, this work aims to ascertain the extent of globalization and the structure of knowledge hierarchy, as they find expression in a successful international television format. Three cultural profiles emerge: American, western European and eastern European, which also characterizes the Arab world. The American model features a high percentage of questions on light entertainment and a low amount of language questions. Quizzes from west Europe offer a high proportion of language questions and a medium amount of questions on light entertainment. The Arab quiz and quizzes from east Europe are noted for keeping a higher amount of questions on history and language and a low proportion of questions on light entertainment. In terms of knowledge hierarchy, in all the countries, academic knowledge yields higher prizes than everyday knowledge.     

Proxies for birth control. Comment on Kelly and Cutright,Sociological Focus,April 1983

Kelly and Cutright (1983), using regression techniques, conclude that birth control is among the more important determinants of Swedish illegitimacy. To derive this conclusion, they use changes in the marital fertility of wives aged 35-39 as a proxy for birth control. They maintain that annual change in the marital fertility rate of wives aged 35-39 is not likely to be greatly influenced by annual change in factors other than birth control. The "argument" appears to derive from the "desired family size" model of childbearing--a basic assumption of social demography. In it simplest form it states that most couples do not practice birth control until they reach a preconceived goal, or desired family size. It thus implies that a change in family size preferences will most affect the birth control practices of the oldest reproductive age groups. The simple form of the model has been questioned by the failure of Western couples to reproductively compensate for a major proportion of their child deaths, by the proportions of Western couples who say they would have preferred larger families than they actually had, by the predictive inadequacy of family size preferences, and by suggestions that age may be the more important determinant of reproduction. As a result some demographers now concede its inadequacy. Others are trying to relax its assumptions, with as yet problematic success. Essentially every Western fertility decline to date has been characterized by an increasing concentration of childbearing in the youngest age groups. In discussing this pattern social demographers have maintained that it could only have come about by a decline in family size preferences. This then is the standard argument supporting Kelly and Cutright's proxy for birth control. The authorities who offer it generally ignore the difficulties with the desired family size model and simply assert without justification that couples do in fact conform to it. Data on the age patterns of chronic disease and on the reproductive effects of environmental stressors suggest that the modern age pattern of fertility could also be produced by a deteriorating environment. Kelly and Cutright are incorrect in asserting that factors other than voluntary birth control could not be responsible for changes in fertility at ages 35-39. At best they may argue that their proxy is uniquely definitive provided that the desired family size model can be saved and provided the health of Western populations has not been compromised by technological change. At issue is a debate between what Dunlap calls the human exemptionalist and the ecological world views.     

Immigrant fertility: an examination of social characteristics and assimilation

"This study compares the fertility patterns of foreign-born and native-born women in Canada and examines whether [the] same set of social characteristics accounts for differential fertility among both the groups. The study also assesses the importance of social characteristics and assimilation on immigrant fertility behavior. Two generations of currently married/cohabiting women with spouse present are analyzed using multiple regressions. The results reveal similar effects on fertility of social characteristics for foreign-born and native-born, while in the case of younger generations the effects are stronger."     

Rural Income-Generating Programs and Fertility Limitation: Evidence from a Microdemographic Study in Nepal1

Abstract Participation in rural development programs that organize members into local cooperative groups can alter the decision-making environment facing couples to reflect some of the negative consequences of childbearing. This study uses data from Nepal, collected through a combination of ethnographic and survey methods, to test the effects of participation in such a development program on fertility behavior. Results demonstrate that program participants are much more likely to use contraceptives to limit their fertility than are non-participants. The study provides empirical support for theories linking this type of institutional change to fertility and indicates a policy option that can allow some negative consequences of childbearing to affect couples' fertility decisions.     

Fertility and fertility-related behavior among Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white female adolescents

Ethnic differences in fertility-related behavior are examined in a community-based probability sample of 706 Mexican-American and 317 non-Hispanic white females aged 13 through 19 years. Mexican-Americans are more likely than whites to have had a live birth, but are no more likely to have been pregnant and are less likely to have had sexual intercourse. Sexually experienced Mexican-Americans, however, are twice as likely as whites to have been pregnant. Among those ever pregnant, Mexican-Americans are more likely to have had a live birth, while whites are more likely to have had an abortion. Ethnic differences remain strong when socioeconomic status and indicators of social instability are controlled statistically, lending more support to the "minority status" hypothesis than to the "characteristics" hypothesis concerning the fertility-related behavior of minority group members.