Topic: family

Susannah M. Brown and Jeremy Porter study the effects of religion on remarriage for American women. In their study, “The Effects of Religion on Remarriage among American Women: Evidence from the National Survey of Family Growth” (2013), Brown and Porter wanted to find out if religion influences the propensity of remarriage; if so are there denominational variations as previously reported concerning first marriages. They took data for the study from two waves of the National Survey of Family Growth. The first wave was from a 1995 survey from the Inter-Consortium for Political and Social Resource and the second wave in 2002 was from the National Center for Health Statistics. Both surveys were nationally represented. The 1995 survey only interviewed women (10,847) while the 2002 survey interviewed both women (7643) and men (4928). Brown and Porter omitted men from this study because of the small sample size. This study had a dependent variable of the propensity of remarriage “operationalized as those who have remarried versus those who have not remarried following divorce” (Brown and Porter, 2013, p. 465). In the two surveys, there were two denominational affiliation variables. The study only used current denominational affiliation; which they broke down into six groups: catholic, conservative protestant, mainline protestant, other protestant, other faith traditions, and not affiliated. Respondents’ religious salience and worship service attendance were also included in the study. The study measures religious salience by the question “how important is religion in your daily life.” The question, how often do you attend religious services, measured worship service. The first question responses ranged from 1 (not important) to 3 (very important and the second question ranged from 1 (never) to 5 (more than once a week). Brown and Porter put several controls put in place. Exact age at first marriage served as the measure of age at first marriage. Exact age at divorce served as the measure for age of divorce. Respondents’ sex, race, resident children, employment status, total family income, and educational attainment were statistically controlled. Respondents’ race and ethnicity were combined and coded into African American, Hispanic and other racial or ethnic groups with white as the reference category. Metro and non-metro variable was dummy coded to gauge a marriage market difference due to geographical variations. A coded variable showing the data source was included to control differential remarriage ranges across the two periods. They put two additional controls on gender ideology and cohabitation status. They created an index variable for gender ideology by combining two questionnaire items that were standardized before being combined. The cohabitation variable comes from several surveys asking respondents premarital and post-divorce cohabitation status. This study uses a two-phase analysis approach. The study discovered that denominations that place a greater emphasis on marriage state are likely to exhibit higher rates of remarriage. Also found that American women who feel that religion is important in their lives and attend religious services frequently are more likely to get remarried. The study uncovered that the effects of religious salience and worship service attendance played a large role in the propensity to get remarried. The control variables of age at divorce, race, the number of resident children, employment, income, gender ideology, and cohabitation status were all found to be significant predictors in the propensity to get remarried.