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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
A Comparison Of Civilian And Enlisted Divorce Rates During The Early All Volunteer Force, Jennifer H. Lundquist
A Comparison Of Civilian And Enlisted Divorce Rates During The Early All Volunteer Force, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist
The belief that enlisted military divorce rates are unusually high is a recurring theme expressed among those living in the military community, yet quantitative data on military divorce rates remain a virtual lacuna. The all-volunteer enlisted force also happens to be an almost all-married enlisted force. Assessing the degree of marital dissolution experienced by military personnel has important implications for the well being of military families and also for readiness levels and reenlistment likelihood. In this paper, I analyze underutilized military data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and find that enlisted divorce rates in the Armed Forces are …
The Black–White Gap In Marital Dissolution Among Young Adults: What Can A Counterfactual Scenario Tell Us?, Jennifer H. Lundquist
The Black–White Gap In Marital Dissolution Among Young Adults: What Can A Counterfactual Scenario Tell Us?, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist
One of the most heavily studied subfields of family sociology is that of racial disparities in family formation trends. While divergent black–white patterns in divorce are well documented, their underlying causal factors are not well understood. Debates on whether such differences are due to socioeconomic compositional differences, cultural differences, or some degree of each continue to surface in the literature. In this article, I use the U.S. military as an institutional counterfactual to larger society because, I argue, it isolates many of the conditions commonly cited in the literature to explain race differences in divorce trends. Using the National Longitudinal …
When Race Makes No Difference: Marriage And The Military, Jennifer H. Lundquist
When Race Makes No Difference: Marriage And The Military, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist
While “retreat from marriage” rates have been on the rise for all Americans, there has been an increasing divergence in family patterns between blacks and whites, with the former experiencing markedly higher divorce, nonmarital childbearing and never-marrying rates. Explanations generally focus on theories ranging from economic class stratification to normative differences. I examine racial marriage trends when removed from society and placed in a structural context that minimizes racial and economic stratification. I compare nuptial patterns within the military, a total institution in the Goffmanian sense, which serves as a natural control for the arguments presented in the literature on …