Marital Expectations among Cohabiting Men and Women

Jessica A. Cohen, Bowling Green State University

The goal of this paper is to examine the influence of prior relationship history and fertility history on expectations of marriage; hence investigating whether a race and ethnicity differential does exist in marital expectations and whether introducing prior relationship or fertility history into the model explains the existence of such a differential. The analysis will be limited to the 369 cohabiting men and 741 cohabiting women. I plan to use logistic regression to analyze the effects of the independent variables on marital expectations and test whether ordered logistic modeling is a better technique for analysis by retaining the ordinal nature of the dependent variable. Men and women will be analyzed using separate models. This study will help us determine whether there are two types of cohabitors: those that are on the pathway toward marriage and those who are using cohabitation as an alterative to dating.