Where’s the Smoke?

Tobacco salesmen eager for big profits should look for areas where marriage chapels are scarce.  For when researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health recently mapped smoking prevalence in the 48 contiguous states, their cartography revealed as much about the healthy and relatively smoke-free state of marriage as it did about the states with recognizable geographical outlines.  For whether they are looking at Florida or Washington, California or Maine, the Harvard scholars find that divorced and unmarried Americans are much more likely to smoke than their married peers.

Tabulating data from all 48 states, the authors of the new study calculate that never-married white women are 27% more likely to smoke than married peers; similarly, divorced or separated white women are 99% more likely to smoke than are married peers (p < 0.001 for both comparisons).  Likewise, never-married white men are 20% more likely to smoke than their married peers; divorced or separated white men are 91% more likely to smoke than married peers (p < 0.01).  A similar pattern emerges among black men and women, with significantly higher smoking rates again documented among the unmarried and divorced or separated than among the married (p < 0.01).

Things look only slightly different within the nation’s Hispanic population.  As among white and black women, unmarried and divorced or separated Hispanic women smoke at rates that run significantly higher than that seen among married Hispanic women (p < 0.01 for both comparisons). And as among white and black men, divorced or separated Hispanic men smoke at significantly higher rates than found among married Hispanic men (p < 0.01).  Only among single men does the relationship between marital state and smoking rate appear in any way unique among Hispanics.  But even here the pattern differs only slightly from that seen among other ethnic groups: compared to married Hispanic men, single Hispanic men do smoke more, but the difference in married-single smoking rates is not large enough to reach the standard threshold for statistical significance, emerging as only a statistical trend (p < 0.10).

Public health officials have tried for decades to curtail smoking by putting warnings on cigarette packages.  Perhaps it is time to start posting similar warnings in divorce courts?

(Source: Theresa L. Osypuk et al., “Are State Patterns of Smoking Different for Different Racial/Ethnic Groups? An Application of Multilevel Analysis,” Public Health Reports 121 [2006]: 563-577.)

Libertines at Risk  

Since the Sixties, Americans have heard often from sexual liberationists proclaiming the normalness—and even healthiness—of premarital sex (fornication in the language of our grandparents) among adolescents, so long as they use prophylactics.  But the latest research indicates that when teens experiment with premarital sex, they are headed for troubles that will never be palliated by wider distribution of condoms. 

In a study recently published in The Journal of Research on Adolescence, pediatricians at Albert Einstein College of Medicine report evidence linking teen sexuality to a number of other risky behaviors.  Parsing data collected through a randomized sample of 1,052 inner-city youth involved in a pilot STD/HIV program, the researchers detect a clear pattern.  The data clearly indicate that “being sexually experienced was associated with other indicators of risk.”  For instance, compared to continent peers, “sexually experienced adolescents were more likely to have ever smoked cigarettes, drunk alcohol, smoked marijuana, or used other illicit drugs at any time or to have used them in the previous six months” (all p values < 0.01).

The Einstein scholars report further that, compared to continent peers, sexually experienced teens have “self-reported poorer grade averages” and are “more likely to be high school dropouts” (p < 0.01 for both grade averages and high-school completion).  

When the researchers shift their focus to the social circumstances of sexually active teens, a distinct pattern emerges: when the sexually experienced youth were compared with their continent peers, a markedly “smaller proportion” of sexually experienced adolescents was found to be living with two biological parents (p < 0.001).  The researchers reason that this pattern may reflect “better parental monitoring and supervision” in intact families than in single-parent households.

Clearly, Americans who care about adolescent well-being need to stop worrying about whether teens have access to birth control and need to start worrying about whether they have access to two parents.

(Source: Ellen Johnson Silver and Laurie J. Bauman, “The Association of Sexual Experience with Attitudes, Beliefs, and Risk Behaviors of Inner-City Adolescents,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 16 [2006]: 29-45.)

Lasting Happiness  

How long does marriage enhance the happiness of couples who wed?  For some time, social scientists have believed that wedlock makes couples happier throughout life.  However, in 2003 a team of researchers published a “jarring challenge to this consensus” in the form of a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  The psychologists who published this iconoclastic 2003 study concluded that although marriage delivers “a temporary positive ‘honeymoon effect,’” it does not enhance couples’ happiness in the long run.  Invoking the “‘setpoint’ theory in psychology,” these researchers argued that “a person’s subjective well-being tends to center around a setpoint determined by genetics and personality” and that marriage “merely deflect[s] a person temporarily from this level.”   Now, however, social scientists at Southern California University have revisited the topic of marriage and happiness in a new study that discredits the 2003 research and establishes, once again, that earlier social scientists and generations of folklorists had it right all along: an intact marriage means living “happily every after.”

To determine the true relationship between marital status and happiness, the authors of the new study carefully examine data collected between 1984 and 2004 in 21 annual waves of a large German panel study.  Just as the authors of the 2003 study asserted, analysis of these data does show that marriage brings with it “a ‘honeymoon period’ effect on life satisfaction, followed by a decline.”  However, the new analysis contradicts the 2003 study by revealing that even after the honeymoon effect has washed out, “individuals in marital unions are still happier, on average, than they were in their baseline period.”  In other words, “the formation of successful [marital] unions...has a positive effect on well-being,” an impact that lasts long after the honeymoon.

What is even more telling is the result when the Southern California researchers re-examine the data used in the 2003 study.  “If we run our [statistical model] on their sample,” the Southern California scholars report, “the same difference [in relative marital happiness] is found as reported here.”  The authors of the 2003 study apparently reached erroneous conclusions because of “their failure to treat age as varying with time, and thus to control for life circumstances.”  When this statistical failure in the 2003 study is properly corrected, the new results “run counter to the setpoint model of psychology,” which recognizes no happiness-enhancing effect of wedlock.  Thus, the new study provides fresh confirmation for “the ‘social support’ interpretation commonly offered for the association between marriage and life satisfaction.”

Sound statistical analysis again indicates that “the formation of [marital] unions has an enduring positive effect on life satisfaction.”     

And though this study is based on German data, readers may well suppose that a successful marriage brings lasting happiness in Boston just as it does in Berlin.

(Source: Anke C. Zimmerman and Richard A. Easterlin, “Happily Ever After? Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Happiness in Germany,” Population and Development Review 32 [2006]: 511-528, emphasis added.)  

Coeds At Risk  

Many Americans think that abstinence is fine for high school students, but unrealistic for the college set. Yet a new book written anonymously by a campus psychiatrist, who has since been revealed as Miriam Grossman of UCLA, lays out why the message of confining sexual relations to the marriage bed may be relevant now more than ever to college students.

While relating personal stories of students, especially coeds, “who are casualties of the radical activism” of campus health centers, Unprotected explores what the medical literature says about the sexual permissiveness, experimentation, and androgyny the centers push. Grossman explains why the female body, relative to the male, is more vulnerable to most STDs (although dramatically less vulnerable to HIV) and why women suffer more side effects and long-term consequences from premarital sex and STDs, both emotionally and physically. Chapters on HPV and chlamydia point out how, even if detected and treated early, they pose problems for a woman’s fertility and increase risks of miscarriage.

Although not quantifying this statistically, she links the unrestrained sexual activity on campuses to what she considers epidemics of STDs, depression, skin cutting, and eating disorders among students. Yet campus health centers, she claims, are part of the problem. Rather than informing students that STDs are preventable (through abstinence), centers seek only to lower risks with appeals to “limit partners, use condoms, and get tested regularly.” Likewise, guidance about HIV is distorted, scaring those who face little or no risk (mostly women) with exaggerated claims that “anyone can get HIV,” but treating those at high risk (males who engage in same-sex intimacy) with kid gloves, reluctant to warn them—or their partners—of their peril.

The psychiatrist further laments that centers say nothing to coeds about protecting their reproductive systems or the optimal time frame for conceiving and bearing healthy children. They further ignore the more immediate issues coeds face like the anguish of herpes, the looming fertility crisis, the trauma of abortion, and the emotional upheaval of broken relationships. (Promiscuous coeds, she finds, are more likely to seek counseling and rate their relationships as “stressful.”) And while campus counselors are ready to deal with sexual harassment, date rape, and even transgendered identity issues, no corresponding effort is made to reach out to the 3 million women infected with chlamydia or the majority of sexually loose college women who have HPV.

“We must recognize,” Grossmann warns, “that campus counseling (in fact, all of mental health) as it now stands has been hijacked by repressive, radical ideologies....The next step is to realize that these radical agendas...are a prescription for disaster.” While she doesn’t say so, a third step might be distributing a copy of her short and easy-to-read book to every graduating high school senior. That may go a long way to promote the health, fertility, and well-being of young women.

(Source: Anonymous, M.D., Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student [New York: Sentinel, 2006].)

Why Cohabitation Poses Risks  

The sexual revolution has bred confusion when it comes to gender roles, dating patterns, and the meaning of physical affection. Cohabitation also reflects that legacy of ambiguity, leaving women especially vulnerable. According to a review of the literature by three University of Denver psychologists, cohabitation makes it more difficult to read a man’s intentions, exposing women to risks in forming unions (including marital unions) with less than ideal mates.

The three researchers review the clear, documented risks of cohabitation, finding that living together without tying the knot is associated with more negative communication in marriage, lower levels of marital satisfaction, higher levels of marital instability, and greater likelihood of marital domestic aggression. They also find that divorce is more likely among those who lived together prior to marriage and that cohabitation is associated with greater levels of depression and lower levels of self-esteem and life satisfaction.

In their attempt to discover why cohabitation yields these outcomes, the researchers claim the “very ambiguity of cohabitation may undermine the ability of some couples to develop a clear and mutual understanding about the nature of their relationship.” They theorize that this ambiguity contributes to “relationship inertia” that favors cohabitants staying together and perhaps even marrying—even when a relationship has problems—because breaking up is more difficult once they are cohabiting as the couple simply has more at stake. Furthermore, because cohabitation does not, like marriage, increase levels of commitment, cohabitants often compromise a reasonably healthy relationship because of a “less clearly formed commitment.”

The researchers suggest that cohabitation might be less problematic if entered into more deliberatively, where couples “decide” to cohabit, as in the case of a couple doing so during their engagement, rather than “slide” into a cohabiting union without careful reflection on its meaning. Yet couples that honestly study the matter (and the literature) would seem to conclude that the best option is to set up housekeeping after the honeymoon, not before.

Therefore, the challenge today is not so much—as the psychologists suggest—a therapeutic one of reducing risks by “exploring a couple’s history and their decision-making processes around major transitions,” but an educational one of warning a supposedly enlightened generation of the irony (and tragedy) of engaging in behavior that research confirms leaves women vulnerable and decreases chances of their marital success and happiness.

(Source: Scott M. Stanley, Galena Kline Roberts, and Howard J. Markman, “Sliding Verses Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect,” Family Relations 55 [October 2006]: 499-509).

Overwhelming Evidence  

Economists may be familiar with the financial dividends of marriage, but they tend to be less acquainted with the wider benefits documented by psychologists, sociologists, and epidemiologists. To bridge the gap, two British economists catalog the findings of some 95 studies from around the world that quantify the “striking large consequences” that married individuals, and especially married men, enjoy relative to the never-married, the cohabiting, the separated or divorced, and the widowed.

Focusing primarily on longitudinal studies because of their ability to tease out selection effects, the economists explore how marriage itself (not just those who choose marriage) yields robust gains in physical and mental health, longevity, and reported levels of well-being. They also point out not only that these gains are tied to formal marriage, but also how spousal commitment to the institution makes a difference, including boosting marital quality: “Those who feel strongly about marriage,” claim the authors, “experience the largest gains from marrying.”

Moreover, the researchers stress how cohabitation is no substitute for marriage, citing study after study showing how cohabitants report significantly lower quality and more unstable relationships, lower socioeconomic status, as well as higher incidences of depression and alcohol abuse. Married people, in contrast, live longer, healthier, and happier lives, and not simply because they engage in less risky behaviors or because having a spouse lowers a person’s stress. Claiming the consistent pattern is no cross-sectional illusion, the economists conclude that the “protection effect” from marriage is genuine and large. “For males, the longevity effect of marriage may even offset the consequences of smoking.”

Although a compelling review, those already familiar with the literature might like to see the economists explore the irony of why young adults fifty years ago—when the evidence had not been assembled—were more than eager to marry, whereas today—in the face of overwhelming evidence like this—that more and more adults choose to live outside the protective bonds of matrimony.

(Source: Chris M. Wilson and Andrew J. Oswald, “How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health? A Survey of the Longitudinal Evidence,” The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series, No. 728, May 2005.)

The Missing Asset of the Poor  

What is plainly obvious to the common man often surprises the social scientist.  Two social work professors at Washington University in St. Louis, for example, seem a bit taken aback by their study revealing how married-couple households score dramatically higher by all measures of financial health than all other household types and how single female-headed households, which by definition lack a male breadwinner, stand at the very bottom of the economic ladder.

Crunching data from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances, the researchers found that compared to cohabiting households, single male-headed households, and single female-headed households, marriage-based households 1) have higher median incomes, 2) are more likely to have received an inheritance, 3) are more likely to own a business, nonresidential real estate, a vacation home, and savings bonds, 4) carry less debt relative to their assets, and 5) have greater net worth over all. (The study found, not surprisingly, that married-couple households also enjoy greater levels of human capital as expressed in the number of children).

Yet these findings disturb the academicians. “The picture that emerges from this study is bleak,” they lament, noting that the median income of female-headed households is only 40 percent of the married-couple households, while their median net worth is only 20 percent. They also fear that “the disparity in net worth between married-couple households and female-headed households will grow even faster as the disparity in income between these two groups of households widens.”

Common sense would suggest a husband or father might be the asset these households need most to climb the economic ladder. But the researchers, preoccupied with the deviation rather than the norm, call for greater government interventions into such households, including increased daycare and healthcare subsidies, paid maternal leave, and taxpayer-funded Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) that they claim will “directly enhance the opportunities to increase asset holdings” of female-headed households.

While concerned about the disadvantages of female-headed households, the researchers seem oblivious to the irony behind the welfare state that taxes responsible married families to subsidize single mothers who don’t want a husband, but want the economic goodies that come with one. As has happened since the 1960s, the nation ends up with fewer married-parent families and more single parents whose needs are never satisfied, providing more fodder for social scientists that understand neither the family nor economics.

(Source: Martha N. Ozawa and Yongwoo Lee, “The Net Worth of Female-Headed Households: A Comparison to Other Types of Households,” Family Relations 55 [January 2006]: 132-145.)