First Marriage Rates and Non-Marital First Births among US Women

 家庭研究人员、政策制定者和公众普遍认为，结婚率下降会自动大幅增加非婚生育率。拟议研究的目标是通过模拟结婚率变化影响非婚生育率的途径来估计这种关系的大小。该项目的具体目标是研究美国无子女妇女初婚率的变化如何影响三个因素：1）首次非婚生育风险持续时间的变化，2）由于未婚人口的人口构成变化，首次非婚生育率的变化，以及3）首次非婚生育率的变化，由于同居、未婚妇女人口分布或构成的变化。在每个目标中，我们使用的方法侧重于结婚率如何影响非婚头胎风险的暴露，以及这种暴露如何影响经历非婚头胎的女性比例。该研究的数据来自全国家庭成长调查（NSFG），我们重点关注20至29岁的美国女性。总的来说，我们的初步研究结果表明，结婚率的下降影响了美国妇女的比例，通过上述三个人口统计过程中的每一个，但这种影响的程度可能小于许多研究人员的预测。Gray，Stockard，and Stone 2006.）

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Family researchers, policy makers, and the public generally perceive that declining marriage rates automatically and substantially increase the prevalence of non-marital fertility. The goal of the proposed research is to estimate the size of this relationship by modeling the pathways by which changes in marriage rates can influence non-marital fertility. The specific aims of the project are to examine how changes in childless U.S. women's rates of first marriage influence three factors: 1) changes in the duration of exposure to the risk of a first non-marital birth, 2) changes in the observed rate of first non-marital birth, due to changing population composition of the never-married population, and 3) changes in the observed rate of first non-marital birth, due to changes in the distribution or composition of the population of cohabiting, never-married women. In each aim, we use approaches that focus on how marriage rates influence exposure to risk of a non-marital first birth, and how this exposure influences the proportion of women who experience non-marital first births. The data for the study are from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), and we focus on U.S. women at ages 20 to 29. Overall, our preliminary findings suggest that declines in marriage rates have influenced the proportion of U.S. women with a non-marital first birth through each of the three demographic processes listed above, but the magnitude of this influence could be smaller than predicted by many researchers (c.f. Gray, Stockard, and Stone 2006.)