Ambivalent Acceptance of Single-Parent Families: A Response to Comments

Why do Americans continue to express ambivalence toward divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and single-parent families decades after these pathways to family formation became commonplace? This question emerges from my own research published in this issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family (Usdansky, 2009) as well as from the three thoughtful accompanying commentaries by Cherlin (2009), Thornton (2009), and LaRossa (2009). Between 1900 and 1998, negative depictions of single-parent families created by divorce plummeted in popular magazines and in social science journals (Usdansky, 2009). But the virtual disappearance of unfavorable depictions stemmed from steep declines in normative debate, not from any increase in favorable depictions of divorce. Most depictions continued to portray divorce as harmful, and depictions of nonmarital childbearing showed no trend toward increased acceptance at all. Yet over the second half of the 20th century, the United States experienced unprecedented increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing. Although much research, including my own, strives to explain growing acceptance of divorce and nonmarital childbearing evident in attitudinal data, it is equally important to ask why there remains a sizeable gap between attitudes and behavior with regard to single-parent family formation in the United States. The answer, I believe, rests in part on how we measure and interpret attitudinal data. In this rejoinder, I argue that limitations of the measures available in survey data and a lack of recent qualitative studies of middle-class attitudes toward divorce and nonmarital childbearing have led scholars to underestimate both the gap between attitudes and family formation behavior and class variation in this gap. I link these claims to critiques offered by the three commentators and discuss the implications of these claims for future research regarding the evolution of family formation attitudes and behaviors - past, present, and future. Approaches to the Study of Family Formation Attitudes Three broad options exist for analyzing American attitudes toward family formation. Quantitative analyses (e.g., Lichter, Batson & Brown, 2004; Mauldon, London, Fein, Patterson, & Sommer, 2004; Thornton, 1989; Thornton & YoungDeMarco, 2001) rely primarily on large-scale, academic surveys available since the 1960s and 1970s. The longitudinal nature of some of these data, their repetition of the same questions over time, and their basis in large, nationally representative samples strengthen the validity of the trends they establish and create the potential for multivariate analysis. But the quantitative approach has drawbacks, too. Most large surveys contain only a limited number of questions about attitudes toward divorce and nonmarital childbearing, and the ability to probe the complexity of attitudes is limited by the closed-ended structure of these questions and the general nature of the attitudes they probe. The lack of contextualization in survey questions is a particular concern in the case of nonmarital childbearing because responses to general statements may hide important differences in beliefs about the circumstances under which childbearing outside marriage is appropriate and the perceived stigma associated with it. Pagnini and Rindfuss's (1993) analysis of several waves of a commercial survey data hint at this possibility. Unlike most survey data, the Virginia Slims American Women's Polls distinguished between the acceptability of nonmarital childbearing in general and nonmarital childbearing within the respondents' own families. Whereas the share of White women and men who agreed with the general statement "There is no reason why single women shouldn't have children" rose from about one third in 1974 to almost one half in 1985, acceptance of nonmarital childbearing within respondents' families was much lower in both years, rising from 7.7% to 13.9% among women and 8. …