Tracking marital attitude change among high school students and predicting later union transitions.

Abstract

Utilizing longitudinal data originally gathered from 1,010 high school freshman in a Midwestern metropolitan area, this study seeks to examine how marital attitudes change across late adolescence and into young adulthood and then how those marital attitudes might be used to predict the transition into cohabitation and marriage. Results suggest that as adolescents begin to enter young adulthood they place an increasingly important emphasis on marriage as a life goal and have a higher expectation to marry. Marital attitudes in late adolescence are also predictive of the transition to marriage but not to cohabitation. Results are examined within the context of common demographic factors such as gender, race, and family structure.