Marriage in the New Millennium: A Decade in Review

This review focuses on broad themes characterizing marital research in the past decade. In addition to continuing themes, such as a focus on conflict, violence, and impact on physical and mental health outcomes, we also address the impact of the Healthy Marriage Initiative on marital research and recent advances in methodology. We highlight an overarching theme that characterizes much of the literature: the importance of context in understanding marital outcomes and the impact of positive marital transactions and marital strengths. Given the increasing diversity of married couples, the attention given to context over the past decade has been timely and appropriate, providing an increasingly solid foundation for future research. Key Words: dyadic data, family diversity, family policy, marital conflict, marital satisfaction, religion. The current analysis comes at a time when pair bonding options are increasing and marriage as a social institution is less dominant in the United States than at any other time in history (Cherlin, 2004). Similarly, fewer people in Western industrial societies are marrying, and divorce rates are increasing throughout the world (Adams, 2004). Perhaps not surprisingly, the decade witnessed rigorous debate on the decline of marriage and of its deinstitutionalization (e.g., "A Symposium on Marriage and Its Future," Journal of Marriage and Family, 2004). At the same time, however, the breadth and scope of work on marriage is unparalleled. In the last decade, articles with the word "marriage" in their title increased by approximately 48% compared to the preceding decade (1,417 vs. 960). This work was dispersed over several overlapping, yet generally distinct, literatures found across several disciplines. The research focused on numerous topics, including psychological factors, sociodemographic variables and trends, parenting, physical and mental health, biological processes, or various combinations thereof. Meaningful integration of the subtleties and nuances of each of these literatures, if at all possible, is certainly beyond the scope of a single review. Constrained by the above considerations, as well as overlap with companion decade reviews, we set out to identify and explore some continuing themes and emerging trends that may be of interest to scholars who approach the study of marriage from diverse perspectives. Repeatedly, we were confronted with themes related to the impact of context. In particular, attention to understanding negative marital processes in the context of positive marital processes was omnipresent. At the same time, the impact of the broader environmental context was evident. The current decade review reflects increasing self-consciousness among researchers regarding the social and political context of research that has been less obviously present in previous decades. Finally, we were struck by critical developments in measurement and methods that promise to provide important advances in marital research. Accordingly, the article is divided into three sections. The first documents recent developments on familiar topics such as marital conflict, marital violence, and marital impact on health to emphasize progress in identifying key elements of the marital context, particularly the impact of positive factors. The emphasis on context continues in the second section, where we place marital research in the broader context of changing social policy to show how this environment has influenced research. In particular, we address the emergence of federal funding to promote healthy marriage and its impact on scholarship over the decade and note how it has pushed the field strongly toward greater consideration of practical issues. As a consequence, we have seen new interest in diversity and populations facing various challenges. Surprisingly, this externally driven focus on the practical has also opened the field to greater study of key issues previously understudied, such as the impact of infidelity and the role of religion in marriage. …