Women’s Marital Expectations and Subsequent Union Outcomes among Fragile Families

Sharon Sassler, Ohio State University
Soma Roy, Ohio State University
Elizabeth A. Stasny, Ohio State University

We evaluate the association between men’s economic attributes and their partner’s views about marriage. Data are from unmarried couples in the Fragile Families Study, and multiple imputation techniques are used to account for men’s non-response. We focus on how men’s economic attributes – earnings, educational attainment, and employment – shape partners’ expectations regarding the likelihood of marriage, and whether relationships transition to cohabitation or marriage. Incorporating imputed values for missing data reduces men’s attainment levels. We use multivariate techniques to examine the relationship progression of new parents in the year following the initial interview; models corrected for missing information are compared to parallel analyzes performed on the sample affected by missing data. Preliminary results suggest that failure to account for selective data loss significantly overstates women’s marital expectations. The proportion entering into marriage does not alter greatly, as this was such an infrequent event in the unrepaired data.