4.3 Article

Marriage, Cohabitation, and Sexual Exclusivity: Unpacking the Effect of Marriage

Journal

SOCIAL FORCES
Volume 97, Issue 3, Pages 1231-1256

Publisher

OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/sf/soy082

Keywords

-

Categories

Funding

  1. Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [P01-HD31921, T32 HD007168, R24 HD050924, R24 HD047879, 5T32HD007163]

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Sexual concurrency, or having temporally overlapping sexual partnerships, has important consequences for relationship quality and individual health, as well as the health and well-being of others embedded in larger sexual networks. Although married and cohabiting couples have similar, almost universal expectations of sexual exclusivity, the former report significantly lower rates of engaging in sexual concurrency than the latter. Given that this difference in behavior occurs despite similar expectations of sexual fidelity, sexual exclusivity can provide an important test of whether marriage has a causal effect on relationship behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, I estimate an instrumental variable model testing whether observed differences in sexual concurrency between marital and cohabiting relationships are attributable to marriage itself via a recent implementation of the special regressor method, an estimator for binary choice models with endogenous regressors. I find evidence that, relative to cohabitation, marriage reduces the likelihood that an individual will engage in concurrent sexual relationships. Finding an effect of marriage in a recent cohort of young adults suggests that, despite changes in marriage and cohabitation, marriage still influences individual behavior.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.3
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available