Generous or Greedy Marriage? A Longitudinal Study of Volunteering and Charitable Giving

Although many scholars have long assumed that marriage is good for society, a recent debate has arisen within the field of family studies over whether marriage is a "generous" or "greedy" institution in how it affects married people's interactions with people outside the marriage. Recently, Sarkisian and Gerstel (2008) challenged the assumption that marriage is always good for society by showing that marriage tends to reduce the time people spend with friends and other family members. In this study, we extended this analysis to volunteering and charitable giving. Is marriage greedy, so that newlyweds spend less time and money on volunteering and giving and more on their new relationship and new household? Or is marriage generous, encouraging participation in volunteering and charitable giving? We examined the short-term effects of marriage on volunteering and charitable giving using longitudinal data from the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS) module of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID; http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/). The multiple waves of COPPS data make it possible to compare individuals' giving and volunteering in the years before marriage with their giving and volunteering shortly afterward. By tracking individuals over time, this study avoided the problem of selection effects that have existed in earlier studies. It also enabled us to analyze whether marriage has a different effect on the giving and volunteering of men and women. We posed two research questions. First, do individuals' donations of time and money to nonprofit organizations increase or decrease after marriage? Second, are these effects different for husbands and wives? This study contributes to the knowledge base by being the first project to use longitudinal data to compare giving before and shortly after marriage and one of the first to use longitudinal data to study the effect of marriage on volunteering. In it, we examined gender differences in the effects of marriage and whether husbands or wives have more influence over charitable giving in the new marriage. Its findings help resolve questions of whether and how marriage is good and bad for civic engagement and the well-being of society.REVIEW OF THE LITERATUREGenerous and Greedy MarriageAs Sarkisian and Gerstel (2008) pointed out, most scholars have assumed that marriage is good both for the married people themselves and for society as a whole. Of course, marriage is an institution that has varied greatly over time and across societies. Like most of the research we cite in this section, in this study we examined marriage in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, which differs from marriage in other countries and in the United States itself in earlier periods (Coontz, 2005). Some of our theoretical assumptions rest on a model of the life course that assumes that first marriage occurs in one's 20s or 30s and that marriage occurs before childbearing. Although this assumption holds for most Americans, it does not hold for many, in particular for low-income people of color (Edin & Kefalas, 2005). Evidence for the positive effects of marriage is abundant. Much research shows that married people enjoy better health, longer lives, and more happiness, on average (WaiteG Nock, 1998; Putnam, 2000) and religious congregations (P. E. Becker & Hofmeister, 2001; Nock, 1998). If marriage really has all these beneficial effects, it seems likely that marriage would also increase volunteering and charitable giving. Health, happiness, and income all correlate positivelywith volunteering and giving (Bekkers W Musick &Wilson, 2008), so if marriage increases these variables, then it should increase giving and volunteering as well. …