Cohabitation Expectations among Young Adults in the United States: Do They Match Behavior?

Cohabitation continues to rise, but there is a lack of knowledge about expectations to cohabit and the linkage between expectations and subsequent cohabitation. We capitalize on a new opportunity to study cohabitation expectations by drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79) main youth and two waves (2008 and 2010) of the NLSY young adult (YA) surveys (n=1,105). We find considerable variation in cohabitation expectations: 39.9% have no expectation of cohabiting in the future and 16.6% report high odds of cohabiting in the next two years. Cohabitation expectations are associated with higher odds of entering a cohabiting relationship, but are not perfectly associated. Only 38% of young adults with certain cohabitation expectations in 2008 entered a cohabiting union by 2010. Further investigation of the mismatch between expectations and behaviors indicates that a substantial minority (30%) who entered a cohabiting union had previously reported no or low expectations, instances of what we term "unplanned cohabitation." Our findings underscore the importance of considering not just behavior, but also individuals' expectations for understanding union formation, and more broadly, family change.

Parents' testosterone and children's perception of parent-child relationship quality.

We examine the link between parental testosterone and children's perceptions of their relationship with their mother and father. Using data from 352 predominantly white working and middle class families, we find no direct link between mother's and father's testosterone and parent-child closeness. However, the association between mothers' testosterone and mother-child closeness appears to be influenced by the quality of two other family relationships. When father's marital satisfaction is low, mothers with high testosterone have a poorer relationship with their children. And, when fathers report low levels of intimacy with their children, high testosterone women have a poorer relationship with their children. No comparable associations were observed among fathers.

Understanding Activist Leadership Effort in the Movement Opposing Drinking and Driving.

Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders. Taken together, our model explains 45 percent of the variation in leadership effort. We find bureaucratic complexity and victim support activities are more powerful predictors of effort than are individual leader characteristics, although all are important. Further analysis reveals that gender almost wholly conditions the strong effect of bureaucratic complexity on leadership effort so that increasingly complex chapter structures are associated with substantial increases in work hours for women but not men.