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Family, Life Course, and Society Commons™

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Family, Life Course, and Society

Is Love (Color) Blind? The Economy Of Race Among White Gay & Straight Daters, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Ken-Hou Lin Jan 2015

Is Love (Color) Blind? The Economy Of Race Among White Gay & Straight Daters, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Ken-Hou Lin

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

A drawback to research on interracial couplings is that it almost exclusively studies heterosexual relationships. However, compelling new evidence from analyses using the Census shows that interracial relationships are significantly more common among the gay population. It is unclear how much of this reflects weaker racial preference or more limited dating markets. This paper brings unique individual -level data rather than couple-level data to bear on what might be driving the difference. We examine the interactions of white gay and straight online daters who have access to a large market of potential partners by modeling dyadic messaging behaviors. Results show …

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Reinstitutionalizing Families: Life Course Policy And Marriage In The Military, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Zhun Xu Jan 2014

Reinstitutionalizing Families: Life Course Policy And Marriage In The Military, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Zhun Xu

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

The transition to adulthood has become an increasingly telescoped process for Americans with marital formation occurring increasingly later in the life course. It is therefore striking to find a context like the U.S. military where marriage rates bear an anachronistic resemblance to those of the 1950s era. Using narrative data from life history interviews with military affiliates collected as part of a larger study on the impact of institutions on families, we show that the military has reinstitutionalized military families at the same time that civilian families are becoming deinstitutionalized. Structural conditions of modern military service, such as war deployment …

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Mate Selection In Cyberspace: The Intersection Of Race, Gender, And Education, Ken-Hou Lin, Jennifer H. Lundquist Jan 2013

Mate Selection In Cyberspace: The Intersection Of Race, Gender, And Education, Ken-Hou Lin, Jennifer H. Lundquist

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

In this article, the authors examine how race, gender, and education jointly shape interaction among heterosexual Internet daters. They find that racial homophily dominates mate-searching behavior for both men and women. A racial hierarchy emerges in the reciprocating process. Women respond only to men of similar or more dominant racial status, while nonblack men respond to all but black women. Significantly, the authors find that education does not mediate the observed racial preferences among white men and white women. White men and white women with a college degree are more likely to contact and to respond to white daters without …

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"The Best Years Of Our Lives”: Military Service And Family Relationships – A Life Course Perspective, Daniel Burland, Jennifer H. Lundquist Jan 2012

"The Best Years Of Our Lives”: Military Service And Family Relationships – A Life Course Perspective, Daniel Burland, Jennifer H. Lundquist

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

All lives of military personnel and veterans are linked to other lives, but as Burland and Lundquist’s Chapter 8 (in this volume) indicates, this social reality is shown primarily by studies of military families within the relatively short period of the soldiers’ military service. The active-duty service member’s enlistment, departure for basic training, and deployment overseas, when that occurs, are documented by military records, and perhaps by fi eld surveys. By contrast, longitudinal studies of veterans, frequently over many years, have tended to focus on the individual veteran to the exclusion of significant others, family members, and friends. This limitation …

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Parental Leave Usage By Fathers And Mothers At An American University, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Joya Misra, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2012

Parental Leave Usage By Fathers And Mothers At An American University, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Joya Misra, Kerryann O'Meara

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

While many U.S. research universities now offer gender neutral family friendly policies, very few are what might be considered “father friendly.” Campus cultures rarely encourage men to access these policies, or do so reluctantly because some campus actors believe men will use parental leave time for their research instead of for childcare. We employ quantitative and qualitative data to compare the parental leave experiences of men and women faculty at a large research university. In doing so, we assess whether the allegation that men take unfair advantage parental leave is true at a large research university. We find that it …

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Gender, Work Time, And Care Responsibilities Among Faculty, Joya Misra, Jennifer H. Lundquist Jan 2011

Gender, Work Time, And Care Responsibilities Among Faculty, Joya Misra, Jennifer H. Lundquist

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

This study explores how faculty at one research-intensive university spend their time on research, teaching, mentoring, and service, as well as housework, childcare, care for elders, and other long-term care. Drawing on surveys and focus group interviews with faculty, the article examines how gender is related to time spent on the different components of faculty work, as well as on housework and care. Findings show that many faculty report working more than 60 hours a week, with substantial time on weekends devoted to work. Finding balance between different kinds of work (research, teaching, mentoring, and service) is as difficult as …

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Military And Relationships, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Daniel Burland Jan 2009

Military And Relationships, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Daniel Burland

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

No abstract provided.

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Race And Childlessness In America, 1988 – 2002, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Michelle Budig, Anna Curtis Jan 2009

Race And Childlessness In America, 1988 – 2002, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Michelle Budig, Anna Curtis

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

This paper bridges the literature on childlessness, which often focuses on married White couples, to the literature on race and fertility, which often focuses on why total fertility rates and nonmarital births are higher for Blacks than Whites. Despite similarity in levels of childlessness among Black women and White women, Black trends have been largely ignored. Recent research has not adequately explored the extent to which factors driving childlessness may vary among Black and White women. We attempted to fill this gap using the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 3,628) and found many similarities in the predictors of …

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A Comparison Of Civilian And Enlisted Divorce Rates During The Early All Volunteer Force, Jennifer H. Lundquist Jan 2007

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 …

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The Black–White Gap In Marital Dissolution Among Young Adults: What Can A Counterfactual Scenario Tell Us?, Jennifer H. Lundquist Jan 2006

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 …

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Family Formation Among Women In The U.S. Military: Evidence From The Nlsy, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Herbert Smith Jan 2005

Family Formation Among Women In The U.S. Military: Evidence From The Nlsy, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Herbert Smith

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

Although female employment is associated with lower levels of completed fertility in the civilian world, we find family formation rates among U.S. military women to be comparatively high. We compare enlisted women with civilian women using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 3,547), the only data set to measure simultaneously the nuptiality and fertility of both populations. Using propensity score matching, we show that the fertility effect derives primarily from early marriage in the military, a surprisingly ‘‘family-friendly’’ institution. This shows that specific organizational and economic incentives in a working environment may offset the more widespread contemporary social …

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When Race Makes No Difference: Marriage And The Military, Jennifer H. Lundquist Jan 2004

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 …

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