Marital Beliefs Among African American Emerging Adults: The Roles of Community Context,Family Background,and Relationship Experiences

Abstract

The current study explores multiple contexts of development—community, family, and relationship—that predict African American emerging adults’ marital beliefs. Findings suggest that nonmarital relationship experiences and childhood community contexts are robust and independent predictors of marital beliefs. The important role of childhood community context found here suggests that communities may not only be indicative of opportunity structure in local marriage markets but may also be indicative of the virtual structure that shapes marital meaning. By offering a better understanding of the extent to which marital beliefs are embedded in broader community, family, and relationship contexts, the current findings may be used to better specify promising models aiming to understand the causal implications of these beliefs across the transition to adulthood and later in the life course.

Keywords

intimate relationships life course adolescents quantitative dating/relationship formation

The rising age at first marriage and increased rates of nonmarriage, cohabitation, and nonmarital childbearing (see Cherlin, 2010, for a review) have led some to question the relevance of marriage in the United States today (Cherlin, 2009; Wilcox & Cherlin, 2011) and to promote its value and importance (Avishai, Heath, & Randles, 2012). These demographic and presumed cultural changes have brought renewed interest among family scholars in marital beliefs and their implications for behavior across the life course. For instance, marital horizon theory proposes that marital beliefs on the cusp of emerging adulthood shape young people’s behaviors across the transition to adulthood (Carroll et al., 2007). Emerging evidence suggests that this may be the case across a variety of life domains, including risk-taking behavior and nonmarital relationships, and not just marriage (Carroll et al., 2007; Willoughby, 2012; Willoughby & Dworkin, 2009; Willoughby & Hall, 2015). This evidence, however, often rests on an examination of marital beliefs and their influence outside of the broader contexts in which they are likely shaped. A more nuanced understanding and properly specified models of how marital beliefs influence the transition to adulthood (and the remainder of the life course) demands attention to the multiple contexts that give rise to young people’s varied beliefs about marriage. This study serves as a multilevel investigation into community, family, and relationship influences on African Americans’ marital beliefs as they enter the transition to adulthood.

Much research over the past several decades has addressed predictors of marital and, more broadly, family formation beliefs. Generally, however, this work has not been informed by a life course perspective, which emphasizes multiple contexts of development, linked developmental periods, and broader sociohistorical context (Elder, 1998). The current study extends our existing knowledge about the development of marital beliefs by integrating this life course perspective. It does so in several key ways. First, it attends to multiple contexts of development, including community, family, and romantic relationships. Community context has proven to be an important indicator of local marriage markets and hence a significant factor in predicting marital behavior (Lichter, McLaughlin, Kephart, & Landry, 1992; South & Lloyd, 1992). Community context, however, may be indicative not only of the material structure in which young people and their families are embedded but also of the local cultural schemas, or “virtual” structure (Johnson-Hanks, Bachrach, Morgan, & Kohler, 2011), surrounding marriage that are available to young people. As Johnson-Hanks et al. (2011) and Smock, Casper, and Wyse (2008) point out, differential access to both cultural and material resources entails differential access to schematic systems that young people can adopt for themselves. Perhaps due to data limitations, much work has ignored potential community-level influences on marital and other family-related beliefs (for exceptions, see Barber, 2004; Browning & Burrington, 2006; Tucker, 2000), opting instead for an analysis of family- and individual-level explanations for variation in such perspectives. Well-specified models, however, require simultaneous attention to the distinct yet interdependent contexts that may shape young people’s beliefs about marriage.

Second, this study attends to the potential interplay between developmental periods. A life course perspective “insists that development is lifelong” (M. K. Johnson, Crosnoe, & Elder, 2011, p. 273) and stresses that experiences in one period of development help shape experiences in another. Efforts to understand the formation of marital beliefs and their subsequent effects across other periods in the life course, then, would benefit from attending not only to multiple contexts of development but also to multiple periods of development. This study does so by utilizing prospective measures of childhood family and community contexts, as well as current indicators of community context, relationship, and educational experiences, domains central to the life course periods of adolescence and the transition to adulthood (Markiewicz, Lawford, Doyle, & Haggart, 2006; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2009).

Third, this study attends to the multidimensionality of marital beliefs, assessing both beliefs about being married and beliefs about getting married (Willoughby, Hall, & Luczak, 2013). Many studies of marital beliefs attend only to the former, more general beliefs about being married. These generalized beliefs, however, are not those thought to have the most predictive power in explaining later behavior. As Carroll et al. (2007, p. 225) note, most young people “value marriage and hope for it in the future,” but they vary in the extent to which they prioritize marriage at the current point in the life course. It is these more life course–specific beliefs that are expected to distinguish young people in their behaviors, both marital and otherwise. Hakim (2003) makes a similar distinction between more generalized, or “public morality,” beliefs, and more life course–specific, or “personal choice,” beliefs, the latter of which are presumed to hold more explanatory power. We lack an understanding of the social contexts that shape these more life course–specific beliefs, however. By taking a multidimensional approach to the study of marital beliefs, this study offers insights into the shared or divergent contexts that shape young people’s generalized beliefs about being married and their more life course–specific beliefs about the salience of getting married.

Finally, and perhaps most important, this study focuses exclusively on young African Americans. Demographic patterns in the family formation behaviors that have sparked concern and debate about the value of marriage are much more pronounced among African Americans when compared with other racial groups. For instance, African Americans have the highest age at first marriage, now older than 30 years for both men and women (Payne, 2012), the highest percentage of never-married adults (Wang & Parker, 2014), and the highest proportion of nonmarital births (Martin, Hamilton, Ventura, Osterman, & Mathews, 2013). Given this context of racialized trends in marriage- and family-related behaviors, much debate has been centered on potential race differences in beliefs about marriage (Bulcroft & Bulcroft, 1993; South, 1993; Tucker, 2000). Much of this research, like that focused on class differences in marital values (Cherlin, Cross-Barnet, Burton, & Garrett-Peters, 2008; Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Trail & Karney, 2012), has failed to substantiate claims of sizeable race differences in the importance and value of marriage. Still, other work suggests that young African Americans are more focused on future careers than relationships (McCabe & Barnett, 2000), hold more liberal sexual attitudes than Whites (Browning & Burrington, 2006), and are less likely than Whites to expect marriage by age 25 (Crissey, 2005). Although fruitful, scholarship and debate on potential race differences in marriage- and family-related attitudes has largely obscured within-group heterogeneity (Bryant, Taylor, Lincoln, Chatters, & Jackson, 2008; King, 1999; Raley & Sweeney, 2007). Attention to this heterogeneity is crucial not only to avoid reproducing racial stereotypes but also because it is this variation in young people’s marital beliefs that is thought to help explain variation in their experiences during the transition to adulthood (Carroll et al., 2007; Carroll et al., 2009).

By better contextualizing the marital beliefs of young African Americans, this study captures and explains heterogeneity in these beliefs. In doing so, it provides insight into the multiple contexts that give rise to varied marital beliefs, particularly those thought to influence later behavior, among a population often implicitly or explicitly at the center of popular and academic debates about marital behaviors (Collins, 1998, 2005). Furthermore, it offers practical guidance to better specify models examining the causal implications of these beliefs across the life course, like those central to marital horizon theory.

Multiple Contexts of Marital Meaning

Community Context

Although the ways in which young people’s beliefs about marriage may be shaped from the communities in which they live has received little empirical examination (see Barber, 2004, for exception), a life course perspective suggests that this broader context may be important (Elder, 1998; Elder & Conger, 2014). Supporting this notion, research has demonstrated the important role of community context in predicting other relationship-related attitudes, as well as marital expectations, behaviors, and experiences. Much of this work has focused on the role of community disadvantage and has found community disadvantage to be associated with more liberal attitudes regarding early sexual activity among adolescents (Browning & Burrington, 2006), higher risk of nonmarital childbearing and divorce (South, 2001; South & Crowder, 1999), lower expectations to marry (Tucker, 2000), and lower odds of marriage for African Americans (South & Crowder, 2000, 2010). Community disadvantage is not the only community context that seems to matter, however. Bryant and Wickrama (2005), for instance, showed that the percentage of minorities in a community was an important predictor of greater marital happiness among African Americans. Others have focused on sex ratios, especially when trying to explain the unique marriage and family patterns of African Americans. Some scholars have argued that the relatively high rates of incarceration, unemployment, and death among Black men have led to a dearth of marriageable men, and hence, have uniquely affected the family formation behaviors of African Americans (Albrecht, 2001; Dixon, 2009; Lichter et al., 1992; also see Clarke, 2011, for critique). In fact, greater marriage opportunities have been linked to increased rates of marriage (Lloyd & South, 1996; South & Lloyd, 1992; Trent & South, 2011; Trent, South, & Bose, 2015). Warner, Manning, Giordano, and Longmore (2011) have also linked sex ratios to young adults’ nonmarital relationship experiences, suggesting that the availability of potential partners influences not only marital behavior “but also the process through which individuals search for and evaluate partners prior to marriage” (p. 269).

The above work indicates that community context clearly shapes marital and other family-related behaviors and perhaps even the marital decision-making process. It is less clear regarding the extent to which this context is important for shaping the ways that young people think about and prioritize marriage. Nonetheless, sociological theory suggests that this context may be an important one for socialization toward marriage, as it may help dictate not only the material but also the schematic components of social structure (Johnson-Hanks et al., 2011). Such components help make up the generalized sources (R. Thornton & Nardi, 1975) through which young people begin to anticipate what certain roles, like that of spouse, entail. Hence, the communities in which people live may help determine not only the material resources (e.g., available partners) but also the cultural schemas surrounding marriage available to them. To the extent to which communities operate as both material and virtual structure, then, community context should be an important one in shaping young African Americans’ beliefs about marriage. What is less clear, however, is which community context should matter, that in which one grew up or that in which a young person currently resides (or both). Although research in other areas (e.g., cognitive development) has begun to incorporate time into a conceptualization of neighborhood effects (Sampson, Sharkey, & Raudenbush, 2008; Sharkey & Elwert, 2011), this has not been the case for research linking communities to family and relationship behavior. It is plausible, however, that messages about marriage are not only offered by one’s immediate community context but also by the context in which one grew up. We explore this possibility by attending both to childhood and current (late adolescent) community context.

Family Background

Perhaps the most often considered context within which young people are thought to develop beliefs about marriage is that of the family of origin. Researchers have identified several unique aspects of the family of origin that have proven important predictors of how adolescents and emerging adults think and feel about marriage. For instance, using the National Survey of Families and Households, Trent and South (1992) showed that, even controlling for adult relationship and socioeconomic status (SES), maternal education and employment, as well as family structure, were associated with marital beliefs. Likewise, parental divorce has been associated with more negative attitudes toward marriage at the age of 18 years (Axinn & Thornton, 1996) and lower commitment and confidence upon marriage entry (Whitton, Rhoades, Stanley, & Markman, 2008). Finally, harsh or inconsistent parenting (Larson, Benson, Wilson, & Medora, 1998; Simons, Simons, Lei, & Landor, 2012) and poor marital quality among parents (Cunningham & Thornton, 2006) have been linked not only to hostile views of relationships in general (Simons & Burt, 2011) but also to less positive views of marriage, in particular (Simons et al., 2012).

With the exception of Simons et al. (2012), however, much of the research concerning family-of-origin effects on marital beliefs has neglected the community context within which families live. Given that community context has been consistently linked to family SES and family structure/divorce (South, 2001; Wilson, 1996), parenting quality (Pinderhughes, Nix, Foster, & Jones, 2001), and marital quality (Bryant et al., 2010; Bryant & Wickrama, 2005), or in other words, all of the family-level factors deemed important in producing variation in marital beliefs, it is essential that such family predictors be studied within the larger context of communities. Although selection issues are always a concern when attempting to examine multiple contexts of development (e.g., parents may move into or from certain types of communities based on unmeasured family characteristics; Galster, 2008), we attempt to minimize this omitted variable bias and the conflation of community and family effects by accounting for family socioeconomic, structure, and process characteristics. Furthermore, we avoid the same-reporter and recall bias of family-of-origin effects that plagues existing work by utilizing prospective reports of childhood family experiences from the primary caregivers of our emerging adult respondents.

Relationship Experiences

The final context that is typically considered to help cultivate beliefs about marriage is that of romantic relationships. It is a well-known phenomenon in the developmental literature that, as children mature through adolescence, their primary attachments (Markiewicz et al., 2006) and social supports (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2009) shift away from the family of origin to those of romantic partners. This change also represents movement from the anticipatory stage of role acquisition to the later stages in which individuals progress “from viewing [relationships] from an outside perspective to viewing [them] from inside” (R. Thornton & Nardi, 1975, p. 876). In line with this perspective, Crissey (2005) reported that the presence of a serious romantic partner was associated with adolescents’ perceived likelihood of marriage. Likewise, Carroll et al. (2007) found that marriage appeared to be more salient to young people who were currently dating, as those involved in dating relationships had a lower ideal age at marriage and reported greater marital importance relative to their peers who were not dating. In addition to relationship status, Simons et al. (2012) found that the quality of African American emerging adults’ relationships predicted more positive beliefs about marriage. Importantly, this latter work also found that the quality of romantic relationships accounted for the effects of community- and family-level predictors on marital beliefs, offering additional justification for the need to examine predictors across multiple contexts simultaneously.

Gender, Relationships, and Beliefs About Marriage

In addition to the contexts of development attended to thus far, work to date indicates that gender may play an important role in shaping young African Americans’ beliefs about marriage. The gendered and racialized respectability politics (Collins, 1998, 2005; Higginbotham, 1993) surrounding marriage are thought to imbue marriage with more symbolic value for women than for men in general and for African Americans, in particular (Chasteen, 1994; Sharp & Ganong, 2007, 2011). Such claims, largely drawn from qualitative research (Chasteen, 1994; Clarke, 2011; Collins, 2005; Sharp & Ganong, 2007, 2011), have been loosely supported in national survey data. For instance, A. Thornton’s (1989; A. Thornton & Young-DeMarco, 2001) work indicated that women were more likely than men to prefer to be married and were more certain about getting married despite also being more likely to disagree that marriage brings happiness and to agree that there are few good marriages. This work encourages attention to a broader sociohistorical context of gender inequalities when examining marital beliefs. In particular, it suggests a direct effect of gender on marital beliefs and the potential for gender to condition the effects of relationship experiences. If the symbolic value of marriage is indeed stronger for young women than for young men, women’s beliefs about marriage should be less affected than men’s by their individual relationship experiences. In other words, if it is marriage itself and not marriage to a particular partner that is more valuable to women than to men, women’s orientation toward marriage should be more impervious than men’s to the influence of any given partner.

Current Study

Drawing from a life course framework, the current study broadens our understanding of the multiple contexts that help shape both general and life course–specific beliefs about marriage among African Americans entering the transition to adulthood. New theoretical developments (Carroll et al., 2007) highlight the unique and important role that marital beliefs during this developmental period may play in structuring the transition to adulthood and, potentially, the remainder of the life course. Currently, however, we lack a nuanced understanding of the multiple contexts that engender variation in young people’s orientations toward marriage. This is especially the case for young African Americans for whom investigations into race differences in marital beliefs and behavior has given rise to a false sense of within-group homogeneity (Bryant et al., 2008; Bryant et al., 2010). Furthermore, a better understanding of the contexts that give rise to varying marital beliefs is crucial to the proper specification of models designed to test promising theories, like marital horizon theory, about their effects across the life course. In assessing the extent to which community context, family background, and relationship experiences predict the perceived costs and benefits, importance, and salience of marriage, we expand our understanding of the interplay between multiple contexts of development and multiple dimensions of marital beliefs among young African Americans.

Method

Sample

The current study utilizes data from the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS), which began in 1997 as a longitudinal study of health and well-being among African American families. At the initiation of the study, 889 African American families living in Iowa and Georgia and with a child in the fifth-grade public school system took part. These families were recruited through a two-step process. First, because the FACHS was designed to capture heterogeneity among African Americans, block groups from the 1990 U.S. Census were used to identify neighborhoods that varied on racial composition and SES. On identifying neighborhoods that contained a sufficient number of African Americans, rosters of all African American families who had a fifth grader (the focal respondent) in the public school system were obtained. Families were then randomly selected and recruited by telephone. Participating families were surveyed in their homes first in 1997/1998 and then again every 2 to 3 years thereafter, resulting in a total of six full waves of data by 2011.

Because the current study focuses on marital beliefs among African Americans on the cusp of transitioning to adulthood, the primary data are drawn from focal respondent surveys at Wave 4 of the FACHS (collected in 2007), when these respondents averaged 18.8 years of age. By this wave, 714 focal respondents (80.31% of the total sample) remained in the study. In all analyses, we excluded respondents (3.2%) who reported being married (n = 5, <1%) or engaged (n = 18, 2.5%) by Wave 4. Hence, our analytic sample for each outcome was drawn from the 691 unmarried and unengaged focal respondents (384 young women and 317 young men) at Wave 4, when these respondents were beginning the transition to adulthood. Final sample sizes vary by outcome due to missing data, however. As others have noted (Simons et al., 2011; Simons et al., 2012), there has been little evidence of selective attrition across study waves. For example, respondents who remained in the study by Wave 4 did not differ from respondents who left the study by this wave on measures of family structure, household income, primary caregiver education, parent–child relationship quality, or community disadvantage at Wave 1.

In addition to focal respondent data from Wave 4, we draw on Wave 1 primary caregiver and focal respondent reports of family characteristics to assess family background, 1990 Census tract data for childhood community-level characteristics (Wave 1 residence), and 2000 Census tract data for current community-level characteristics (Wave 4 residence). Nearly three quarters of respondents were living in a different census tract at Wave 4 than they were at Wave 1. Although it is possible that, for each of these community assessments, internal community characteristics could have changed from the time the Census was conducted to the time we interviewed respondents in these neighborhoods, these data provide us with conservative estimates of neighborhood characteristics in both childhood and late adolescence.

Although the FACHS data are not without limitations, they have several features that make them well-suited for the current study. First, they contain multiple dimensions of marital beliefs, including measures of generalized costs and benefits, and a measure of marital salience, which taps into the life course–specific dimension of marital beliefs. Second, the FACHS contains prospective measures of childhood community and family characteristics, allowing us to explore the influence of multiple life course domains on the formation of marital beliefs with less bias than single-reporter, cross-sectional studies have allowed. The use of both childhood and late-adolescent measures of community context may help provide insight into the extent to which communities help provide not only the material but also the virtual structure from which young people adopt marital beliefs. Third, the FACHS contains more general measures of conventionality, including religious involvement, educational aspirations, conventional values, and gender role beliefs. The ability to include these variables as individual-level controls is vital given recent suggestions that marital beliefs, particularly those relevant to marital horizon theory, may simply be an indicator of general conventionality (M. D. Johnson, Anderson, & Stith, 2011). Finally, the FACHS allows for an intricate examination of African Americans’ marital beliefs on the cusp of transitioning to adulthood. As was the case with demographic changes related to family life, African Americans seem to stand out with regard to the degree of instability and nonlinearity experienced during the transition to the adulthood (Settersten & Ray, 2010b). Hence, the nuance offered by the FACHS allows us to examine and explain heterogeneity among African Americans during a particular developmental period that has been posited to affect relationship and other experiences across the remainder of the life course (Carroll et al., 2007; Raley, Crissey, & Muller, 2007).

Dependent Variables

All dependent variables were measured at Wave 4 of the FACHS, the first wave at which they were available. Perceived marital costs (α = .67) were assessed via four questions that asked respondents the extent to which they agreed that marriage was associated with a loss of friends, a loss of freedom, a worse sex life, and a harder life. Perceived marital benefits (α = .69) were assessed via two questions that asked respondents the extent to which they agreed that “marriage leads to a happier life” and “marriage leads to a fuller life.” For both costs and benefits, response categories ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), and items were averaged to form respective indices.

In addition to the perceived costs and benefits of marriage, the general importance of marriage was assessed with one question that was prefaced with “We now have a few questions about your goals and values” and asked “How important is it to you to have a good marriage?” Response categories ranged from 1 (not at all important) to 5 (extremely important). Given that almost two thirds (57.12%) of the sample responded that having a good marriage was extremely important and that less than 3% (2.68%) of the sample responded that having a good marriage was not at all important, this variable was dichotomized such that 1 indicated that having a good marriage was “extremely important,” and 0 indicated that it was not.

The final dependent variable, marital salience, was assessed with one question asking respondents to indicate the extent to which they agreed that “getting married is the most important part of my life.” This measure of marital salience is similar to that used by Willoughby et al. (2013) and is in line with what Hakim (2003) calls “personal choice” beliefs. As emphasized by Carroll et al. (2009) and Carroll et al. (2007), it taps the extent to which getting married is a priority at the beginning of the transition to adulthood. Potential responses ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Although variation in response categories was not as limited as it was with general marital importance, the measure of marital salience was also dichotomized for several reasons. First, the most common response category was Category 3 (neutral or mixed; 38.69%). Second, preliminary ordinal models using all response categories revealed that the parallel regression assumption (Long & Freese, 2006) had been violated. Given that cell sizes across all response categories were not large enough to make multinomial models tenable, response categories 4 (agree) and 5 (strongly agree) were collapsed to indicate the salience of marriage, and response categories 1 (strongly disagree) through 3 (neutral or mixed) were collapsed to indicate a lack of marital salience. This coding produced a more statistically viable variable and made the coding and interpretation of marital salience more consistent with that of general marital importance.

Independent Variables

Community Context

Community context was assessed in childhood (Wave 1) and in late adolescence (Wave 4) via census tract data in 1990 and 2000, respectively. At Wave 1, our analytic sample was nested within 110 unique tracts, and at Wave 4, they were nested within 283 unique tracts. For each of these tracts, four indicators of community context, all of which have been previously associated with family formation behavior or attitudes, were used. These characteristics included the percentage of population that is Black (% Black), sex ratio (unmarried men/unmarried women), the percentage of females divorced (% females divorced), and a community disadvantage index. Community disadvantage was composed of six indicators: percentage of males unemployed, percentage of households below the poverty line, percentage of households receiving public assistance, per capita income (reverse-coded), percentage of population with less than high school education, and percentage of single mother households. These variables were standardized and averaged to form an index of community disadvantage (α = .88). All ratio measures (percentage Black, sex ratio, and percentage of females divorced) were multiplied by 100. Hence, a one-unit change for percentage Black or percentage of females divorced represents a 1-percentage point change, while a one-unit change in sex ratio indicates an increase or decrease of 1 man per 100 women.

Family Background

Family-of-origin characteristics were assessed at Wave 1 mostly via primary caregiver reports. Primary caregivers reported on their highest level of education (in years) and their total household income (dollar values were divided by 1,000 so that a one-unit change in household income indicates a $1,000 change in income). Primary caregivers were also asked about their relation to others living in the household. Those who indicated that there was a secondary caregiver to whom they were married and that both caregivers were the biological or adoptive parents of the focal respondent were coded 1 to indicate that the childhood family structure consisted of a married, two-parent family. For these families, marital quality was assessed via 2 questions addressing primary caregiver relationship satisfaction, 9 questions addressing partner warmth and supportiveness, and 12 questions addressing partner hostility (reverse-coded). These three subscales were standardized and summed to form an index of parents’ marital quality (α = .94). Because not all primary caregivers were married, this variable was coded as an internal moderator (Frech & Williams, 2007; Mirowsky, 1999), meaning that it was standardized prior to assigning unmarried parents a score of 0. The resulting variable varied for focal respondents with married parents and did not vary for focal respondents without married parents. Such coding allows us to assess the extent to which the effect of having married parents varied by the quality of that marital relationship. Finally, primary caregivers reported on their conventional parenting values for their children via nine questions. These questions asked, for instance, how important it is that the focal child “does well in school,” “attends church every week,” and “respects and pays attention to teachers” (α = .73).

In addition to primary caregiver reports of family SES, structure, and process, parent–child relationship quality was assessed at Wave 1 via youth reports. Youth were asked a series of questions about their relationship with their primary caregiver. As with marital quality, these questions tapped overall satisfaction (e.g., “How happy are you with the way things are between you and your [primary caregiver]?”; 2 questions), as well as expressions of warmth (e.g., “During the past 12 months . . . how often did your [primary caregiver] help you do something that was important to you?” and “ . . . let you know [she or he] really cares about you?”; 9 questions) and hostility (e.g., “During the past 12 months . . . how often did your [primary caregiver] get angry at you?” and “ . . . threaten to hurt you physically?”; 12 questions). The satisfaction, warmth, and hostility (reverse-coded) subscales were standardized and summed to form an overall index of parent–child relationship quality (α = .83).

Emerging Adult Romantic Relationships

Focal respondents’ relationship status and relationship quality were assessed via self-reports at Wave 4. Respondents were asked to indicate their current relationship status, and those who reported having a steady romantic partner were coded 1 for being in a romantic relationship. Those involved in a romantic relationship were then asked a series of questions about the quality of that relationship. These questions addressed overall relationship satisfaction (e.g., “How happy are you, all things considered, with your relationship?”; 3 questions), partner warmth (e.g., “During the past month, how often did [partner name] let you know she or he really cares about you?”; 4 questions), and partner hostility (e.g., “During the past month, how often did [partner name] criticize you or your ideas?”; 5 questions). The satisfaction, warmth, and hostility (reverse-coded) indices were standardized and summed to form an index of overall relationship quality (α = .85), which was then coded as an internal moderator similar to the marital quality index.

Controls

Along with community, family, and relationship context variables, we included several individual-level control variables so as to reduce the risk of spurious associations between our primary variables of interest and marital beliefs. Perhaps most important, we included several indicators of general conventionality, including an index of traditional gender role ideology (α = .72), conventional goals (e.g., having children, having a stable job, saving money; α = .77), educational aspirations (1 = did not aspire college degree), and religious involvement (α = .87). In addition to these measures of conventionality, we controlled for educational status (a series of indicators noting degree status and whether or not the respondent was still enrolled in school) and whether or not the respondent reported having any biological children (1 = parent).

Plan of Analysis

An exploration of the ways in which community, family, and relationship contexts influence marital beliefs demands the use of multilevel models. The structure of the FACHS data, individuals nested within community contexts, allows for this multilevel modeling. We utilized Stata 13 xtmixed and xtlogit procedures to conduct multilevel models for marital benefits/costs and marital importance/salience, respectively. Although these models adequately accounted for the nesting of respondents in childhood community contexts and the substantial between-community variation in marital beliefs, with an average of six respondents per tract, there was no significant between-community variation in marital beliefs by Wave 4 tracts, which averaged only two respondents per tract. Hence, models were specified as having two levels, individuals (Level 1) and childhood communities (Level 2).

Although models were built in a stepwise fashion, with individual-level controls entered first, community predictors entered second, family predictors entered third, and relationship predictors entered last, we preserve space by presenting only the final models in the table of results that follows. For each outcome, we tested for a cross-level interaction between sex ratios (in both childhood and adolescence) and female to allow for the possibility that community sex ratios have differential effects on the marital beliefs of young men and women, as has been shown with marital and relationship behavior (Guttentag & Secord, 1983; South & Lloyd, 1992; Warner et al., 2011). Furthermore, Level-1 relationship-by-gender interaction terms were also examined given the potentially gendered links between current relationship experiences and marital beliefs. We present only those interactions that were statistically significant at conventional or marginal levels. All continuous variables were grand mean centered.

Results

Descriptive Statistics

Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and ranges for all study variables. Several patterns are noteworthy in these descriptive data. First, the means presented for general marital importance and marital salience provide empirical support for the theoretical distinction between “public morality” and “personal choice” beliefs made by Hakim (2003) and between beliefs about being married and beliefs about getting married made by Willoughby et al. and called attention to by Carroll et al. (2007). Whereas over half (57%) of respondents at Wave 4 indicated that having a good marriage was extremely important, only about one quarter (24.5%) responded affirmatively when asked if getting married was their primary focus. That is, while marriage was important to most, it was a priority for a minority. Furthermore, bivariate correlations (not shown) revealed that marital salience and the more general marital beliefs were only moderately correlated (general importance: r = .23, p < .05; benefits: r = .35, p < .05; costs: r = .07, ns).

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics for Study Variables.

Variable	M	SD	Min	Max
Marital benefits	3.537	.775	.000	.000
Marital costs	2.887	0.652	1.000	5.000
Marital salience	0.245	0.431	0.000	1.000
General marital importance	0.570	0.495	0.000	1.000
Childhood community (Wave 1)
Sex ratio (unmarried males per 100 unmarried females)	84.585	12.937	44.029	155.598
Percentage Black (×100)	44.856	25.209	0.136	97.297
Disadvantage	−0.002	0.779	−3.094	1.883
Percentage of females divorced (×100)	8.943	3.323	1.924	20.455
Current community (Wave 4)
Sex ratio (unmarried males per 100 unmarried females)	82.891	18.432	36.108	215.509
Percentage Black (×100)	33.257	27.771	0.000	96.712
Disadvantage	0.001	0.767	−1.804	2.578
Percentage of females divorced (×100)	11.918	4.357	0.000	22.738
Family background (Wave 1)
Parent highest education	12.451	2.125	2.000	20.000
Married, biological parents	0.216	0.412	0.000	1.000
Parental marital quality^a	0.024	2.434	−8.311	3.887
Primary caregiver conventional values for child	3.706	0.295	1.000	4.000
Household income (in thousands)	26.190	22.329	0.003	201.100
Target relationship quality of parent–child	−0.007	2.232	−12.283	3.312
Individual characteristics (Wave 4)
Female	0.556	0.497	0.000	1.000
Age	18.826	0.905	16.000	21.000
Religious involvement	1.740	0.815	1.000	5.000
Traditional gender role attitudes	2.325	0.610	1.000	4.000
Conventional goals	4.376	0.524	2.571	5.000
Do not aspire college degree	0.187	0.390	0.000	1.000
No diploma, no school	0.097	0.296	0.000	1.000
School, no diploma	0.265	0.442	0.000	1.000
Diploma, no school	0.248	0.432	0.000	1.000
Diploma, school	0.389	0.488	0.000	1.000
Parent	0.171	0.377	0.000	1.000
Relationship experiences (Wave 4)
Romantic partner	0.512	0.500	0.000	1.000
Relationship quality^b	−0.006	2.251	−11.214	3.792

Parental marital quality reported only for youth with married parents. ^bRelationship quality reported only for adolescents in romantic relationships.

Also of note is that, on average, the young African American respondents in the sample viewed marriage as being fairly beneficial ( $\bar{x}$ = 3.54, range = 1-5) and as having a moderate amount of costs ( $\bar{x}$ = 2.89, range = 1-5). Interestingly, perceived marital benefits and marital costs were not significantly correlated (r = −.04, ns). Gender was significantly associated with both benefits and costs, however, as young women perceived fewer benefits to marriage ( $\bar{x}$ = 3.44, $\bar{x}$ = 3.66, p < .05) and also fewer costs ( $\bar{x}$ = 2.83, $\bar{x}$ = 2.96, p < .05). Such descriptive statistics suggest a nuanced story of young African Americans’ marital beliefs, as costs and benefits were not related in a zero-sum fashion, and the salience of marriage was not suggestive of perceived personal gain (reduced costs and increased benefits).

With regard to community characteristics, childhood and late-adolescent community characteristics were positively correlated with one another (e.g., childhood sex ratios with late-adolescent sex ratios) but did not introduce issues with multicollinearity. Percentage Black was the most stable characteristic, with a correlation of .36 (p < .05) between childhood and late-adolescent communities, while sex ratios were the least stable characteristic, with a correlation of .12 (p < .05) between these communities. Other descriptive statistics that help provide context for the sample and the results that follow can be seen in Table 1.

Table 2 presents the results for the fully conditional models showing community, family, and relationship context effects on marital beliefs. Unstandardized coefficients are presented for all models, and exponentiated coefficients (odds ratios) also accompany the logit models for general importance and salience. Given that the purpose of the study was to explore the role of these different contexts in predicting variation in these marital beliefs, we discuss the results by context of development rather than by outcome.

Table 2.

Multilevel Models Predicting Marital Beliefs From Community, Family, and Relationship Contexts.

	Benefits	Costs	General importance		Salience
	b	b	b	e^b	b	e^b
Childhood community (Wave 1)
Sex ratio^a	−0.002	0.007**	0.000	1.000	0.025	1.026*
Sex ratio × Female		−0.007^†			−0.060	0.942***
Percentage Black (×100)	0.001	0.001	0.005	1.005^†	0.011	1.011*
Disadvantage	−0.064	−0.062	−0.157	0.854	−0.219	0.804
Percentage of females divorced (×100)	−0.010	0.016^†	−0.018	0.983*	−0.023	0.977
Current community (Wave 4)
Sex ratio^a	−0.004*	−0.002	−0.004	0.996	−0.001	0.999
Percentage Black (×100)	−0.001	−0.003*	−0.012	0.988	−0.004	0.996
Disadvantage	−0.043	0.018	0.065	1.067	−0.023	0.977
Percentage of females divorced (×100)	−0.004	0.002	−0.052	0.949	0.009	1.009
Family background (Wave 1)
Parent highest education	−0.006	0.013	−0.077	0.926	−0.062	0.940
Married, biological parents	0.041	0.033	−0.024	0.977	0.498	1.645^†
Parental marital quality	−0.053	0.070	−0.557	0.573**	−0.106	0.899
Primary caregiver conventional values for child	0.197*	−0.001	−0.349	0.705	−0.213	0.808
Household income (in thousands)	0.000	−0.001	0.006	1.006	−0.003	0.997
Target relationship quality with parent	−0.011	0.007	−0.046	0.955	−0.026	0.974
Individual characteristics (Wave 4)
Female	−0.118	−0.002	−0.263	0.769	0.394	1.483
Age	0.052	−0.034	−0.024	0.977	0.137	1.147
Religious involvement	0.085*	−0.069*	0.506	1.659*	0.500	1.648***
Traditional gender role attitudes	0.109*	0.320***	−0.304	0.738	0.426	1.530*
Conventional goals	0.288***	0.060	3.857	47.327***	0.827	2.286**
Do not aspire college degree	0.052	0.061	0.344	1.411	0.350	1.419
No diploma, no school	−0.046	0.232*	0.696	2.005	0.892	2.440^†
School, no diploma	−0.158*	0.061	0.034	1.034	0.251	1.285
Diploma, no school	−0.113	−0.071	0.213	1.238	0.060	1.062
Diploma, school	ref	ref	ref	ref	ref	ref
Parent	−0.141^†	−0.028	−0.515	0.597^†	−0.122	0.885
Relationship experiences (Wave 4)
Romantic partner	0.278**	−0.062	0.647	1.911**	0.464	1.590
Romantic partner × Female	−0.208^†				−0.679	0.507^†
Relationship quality	0.252***	−0.123***	0.290	1.336^†	0.531	1.701^†
Relationship quality × Female	−0.151^†				−0.415	0.660
Constant	3.607	2.884	0.119	1.126	−1.840	0.159
N	603	603	604		602

Note. Respondents nested within childhood community contexts. All continuous variables centered on their grand mean.

Unmarried males per 100 unmarried females.

†

p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Community Context and Marital Beliefs

Ultimately, childhood community context proved more consistently predictive of young people’s marital beliefs than did current community context. All childhood community characteristics, except disadvantage, were significantly predictive of at least one marital belief, yet no indicator of childhood community context was consistently predictive across all outcomes. Sex ratios in one’s childhood community predicted both the costs and salience of marriage, but did so differently by gender. These sex ratio × gender interaction effects are graphed in Figures 1 and 2. As shown in Figure 1, and as supported by simple slope tests, a greater ratio of men to women in one’s childhood community predicted increased perceived marital costs among men, but had no effect among women. As shown in Figure 2, more men relative to women in one’s childhood community reduced the salience of marriage for women but increased this salience for men. This interpretation was supported by simple slope tests, indicating that childhood sex ratios had significant but opposite effects on the salience of marriage for men and women. In addition to sex ratios, a higher proportion of Blacks in one’s childhood community increased both the general importance (p < .10) and salience of marriage, while the prevalence of divorce increased marital costs (p < .10) and reduced marital importance. In contrast to childhood community effects, current community characteristics were generally unrelated to marital beliefs, with two exceptions. A greater number of men relative to women reduced the perceived benefits of marriage for both young men and women. Furthermore, a higher percentage of Blacks reduced the perceived costs of marriage.

Figure 1.

Association between sex ratio in childhood community and perceived marital costs by gender.

Figure 2.

Association between sex ratio in childhood community and marital salience by gender.

Family Background and Marital Beliefs

As can also be seen in Table 2, the prospective measures of family context proved relatively weak and inconsistent predictors of marital beliefs after accounting for childhood and current community characteristics. Only three family factors were associated with marital beliefs at even marginal levels of significance. Primary caregiver conventional values increased young people’s perceived benefits of marriage but, perhaps counterintuitively, for those with married parents, parental marital quality reduced the general importance of marriage. Furthermore, living with married, biological parents was associated with increased marital salience (p = .051).

Relationship Experiences and Marital Beliefs

Along with individual-level control variables, like religious involvement, conventional goals, and gender role attitudes, romantic relationship characteristics proved to be among the most consistent predictors of marital beliefs. The presence of a romantic partner, for instance, was associated with greater perceived marital benefits (b = 0.155, p < .01; coefficient for noninteractive model) and a greater importance placed on having a good marriage (b = 0.647, p < .01). Likewise, the quality of these relationships moderated their effects, such that higher quality relationships were associated with even greater perceived benefits (b = 0.153, p < .001, coefficient for noninteractive model), fewer perceived costs (b = −0.123, p < .001), and a higher log-odds of viewing marriage as important (b = 0.35, p < .01) and salient (b = 0.531, p < .10). In some cases, these effects differed by gender but only at marginal levels of significance. For instance, the positive association between both the presence and quality of a romantic relationship and perceived marital benefits was weaker for women than for men. This gendered effect is illustrated in Figure 3. Likewise, the extent to which simply having a partner made marriage more salient was reduced for women compared with men.

Figure 3.

Association between relationship quality and perceived marital benefits by gender.

Conclusion

This study explored how community, family, and relationship contexts influenced multiple domains of marital beliefs among African Americans entering the transition to adulthood. The meaning and importance of marriage during this developmental period has been posited to influence relationship and nonrelationship experiences across the transition to adulthood (Carroll et al., 2007; Carroll et al., 2009; Willoughby, 2012, 2014; Willoughby & Dworkin, 2009; Willoughby, Medaris, James, & Bartholomew, 2015) and, potentially, the remainder of the life course (Raley et al., 2007; Settersten & Ray, 2010a). Despite renewed interest in the role of marital beliefs in explaining individual and, in particular, group differences in family-related behavior, the role of multiple contexts of development on the formation of such beliefs is not very well understood. Utilizing a life course–sensitive, multilevel framework and prospective measures of community and family context, the current study provides strong evidence for the effects of childhood community context and late-adolescent relationship experiences on the development of young African Americans’ marital beliefs and fairly weak evidence for the effect of family background, independent of these other contexts.

The lack of findings related to family background may be attributable to several factors, some suggesting that family-of-origin effects have been overestimated in previous research and others suggesting that such effects are confounded with community effects. First, the childhood characteristics attended to here were prospective reports from the respondents’ primary caregivers and hence less subject to recall or single-reporter bias, both of which may have inflated coefficients in previous research. Second, the link between family background and marital beliefs may be a spurious one, attributable to neighborhood characteristics, or one mediated by relationship experiences. Given the largely null bivariate correlations between family background and marital beliefs in the current study, however, it is unlikely that substantial family background effects have simply been accounted for by other variables in our models. Third, the current study utilized an all–African American sample. Past research has shown that family-of-origin effects on many relationship and nonrelationship behaviors tend to be weaker for Blacks than for Whites (Amato & Bruce, 1991; Dunifon & Kowaleski-Jones, 2002; Fomby & Cherlin, 2007; Phillips & Sweeney, 2005). This has been posited to be the case because of the greater role that extended families play in Black versus White households and because of the added stress implicit in many Black neighborhoods that makes family-of-origin experiences less salient (McLoyd, Cauce, Takeuchi, & Wilson, 2000). In addition to being less robust predictors of behaviors for Blacks than Whites, it is plausible that family-of-origin experiences may also be less robust predictors of marital beliefs for Blacks than for Whites. Finally, it is possible that some of the community effects found here are actually capturing family-level effects. That is, as noted by Galster (2008), it is possible that families selected themselves into certain neighborhoods based on unmeasured characteristics. We attempted to minimize this omitted variable bias by accounting for a variety of parental/family traits, but this potential selection mechanism may have conflated community- and family-level effects to some extent.

Unlike family background, community characteristics, particularly childhood community characteristics, proved important predictors of marital beliefs. Such findings suggest that communities may provide not only the material structure of available partners but also the virtual structure (Johnson-Hanks et al., 2011) that generates marital meaning and dictates the marital schema available to youth in different communities. This finding supports the necessity of incorporating time into investigations of community effects (Sampson et al., 2008; Sharkey & Elwert, 2011), as communities appear to be relevant long prior to the time at which marital decisions are made.

In particular, childhood community sex ratios and racial composition were associated with the salience of marriage, the only life course–specific marital belief measured here, in late adolescence. For both men and women, childhood sex ratios indicative of a scarcity of different-sex partners made marriage more salient. Furthermore, marital salience was enhanced for both men and women who grew up in communities with greater proportions of African Americans. It is difficult to interpret these findings with respect to the theoretical models meant to explain marital behavior, like the marital search model (Becker, 1981; Oppenheimer, 1988) or demographic opportunity theory (Trent et al., 2015; Trent & South, 2011), or the imbalanced sex ratio perspective (Kiecolt & Fossett, 1997; Lloyd & South, 1996). These theories are concerned with current opportunities for marriage or the gendered rewards and costs of marriage relative to alternatives. What might explain the effects of childhood community context on marital salience nearly 10 years later? Although we lack existing theories to make sense of these effects, qualitative research on the racialized politics of respectability surrounding marriage in the United States today may shed some light. This work suggests that, because Black families have been and continue to be constructed largely in terms of deficits (Collins, 1998; Jenkins, 2007), marriage holds a particular symbolic importance for African Americans. It is possible that this symbolic importance is enhanced for African American youth growing up in communities with imbalanced sex ratios and a higher percentage of African Americans, leading to the increased salience of marriage in late adolescence.

Embedded within these community contexts, young African Americans’ marital beliefs were also associated with their relationship experiences. Importantly, either the presence of a romantic partner or its quality (or both) in late adolescence was associated with greater perceived marital benefits, an increased likelihood of marital importance, lower marital costs, and, to a lesser extent, greater marital salience. There was mixed evidence that these effects differed by gender, but when they did, the findings were consistent with research suggesting that the symbolic value of marriage may be greater for young women than young men (Chasteen, 1994; Collins, 1998, 2005; Sharp & Ganong, 2007, 2011). Although absolute levels of salience did not differ by gender, young women’s views of marriage were somewhat less dependent on the characteristics of particular relationships. This gendered interpretation, however, was inconsistent and only marginally significant and thus should be examined further in future research with larger, more representative samples.

It is important to note that the effects found here maintained significance even after accounting for individual-level measures of conventionality, like religious involvement, gender role attitudes, conventional goals, and education, and that community, family, and relationship contexts proved differentially predictive of different dimensions of marital beliefs. Hence, it appears that marital beliefs, even marital salience, are not simply conceptually and empirically synonymous with conventionality (M. D. Johnson et al., 2011). Furthermore, much of the theoretical and empirical work to date, from which our predictors were drawn, has focused on the more generalized beliefs about marriage captured in our measures of costs, benefits, and general importance. The sometimes overlapping and divergent contexts that make marriage salient for young African Americans at the beginning of the transition to adulthood require more attention given the presumed theoretical distinction between generalized and life course–specific beliefs and the importance placed on these life course–specific measures for predicting later behavior (Carroll et al., 2007; Carroll et al., 2009; Hakim, 2003).

Although providing insight into the multiple contexts of development important in explaining variation in young African Americans’ marital beliefs, the current study has several limitations. First, the age and race homogeneity of the sample restricts its generalizability. The experiences and beliefs of this subsample of youth, however, demand exploration given what seems to be their relatively unique experiences of the transition to adulthood and their disadvantaged status with regard to marital behavior. A second limitation is the study’s single-item measure of marital salience. Although this measure arguably captures the essence of marital horizons (Carroll et al., 2007) by assessing the extent to which marriage is a primary focus of the respondents at the beginning of the transition to adulthood, more nuanced or multi-item measures of marital salience may be able to offer robustness checks of the patterns of results found here. Third, because few of our respondents were married by Wave 4 or even by Wave 6 of the FACHS, marital behavior could not be assessed. The extent to which the marital beliefs assessed here are related to marital behavior is unclear. Finally, because marital beliefs upon entry into the transition to adulthood are the focus of new developmental theories, like marital horizon theory, we focus on marital beliefs at this particular time point. These beliefs, however, may continue to change across the transition to adulthood (Barr, Simons, & Simons, 2015; Willoughby et al., 2015). Attention to the ways in which multiple contexts of development constrain or promote this change is an important avenue of research.

Despite these limitations, the current study points to the importance of childhood community and relationship contexts in explaining variation in marital beliefs among young African Americans. In doing so, it highlights heterogeneity in the experiences and beliefs among this population of young people (Bryant et al., 2008; Bryant et al., 2010; Raley & Sweeney, 2007) that investigations into race differences often overlook. The pattern of results points to the nuanced ways in which young African Americans come to think about marriage on the cusp of the transition to adulthood and encourages an expanded view of local communities as indicative of more than the material structure of the availability and quality of potential marital partners. The findings of this study can guide future research on the distinct yet interdependent contexts of community, family, and relationships that help shape young African Americans’ marital beliefs. These contexts demand greater consideration if we are to understand and properly specify the impact of these beliefs on marriage and other behaviors across the transition to adulthood and later into the life course. Given that demographic trends suggest that the young people studied here are unlikely to marry in the near future despite their generally positive beliefs about marriage, the varied contexts—both material and virtual—important for the development of particular marital beliefs might also allow us to better understand if and when marriage becomes more or less salient over time and, ultimately, contradictions in the link between marital beliefs and later marital behaviors (Garrett-Peters & Burton, 2015).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jeremy Reynolds, Leslie Simons, and K. A. S. Wickrama for their helpful feedback.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the grants MH48165 and MH62669 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

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