How it started

In the late 1970s, sociologists Alan Booth, David Johnson, John Edwards, and Lynn White gathered in a conference room at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to design a study of American marriage. In 1980, they fielded their survey to 2034 married respondents between 18 and 55 via random-digit dialing telephone numbers. They followed these couples for the next twenty years, even collecting data from their adult children in the 90s. In 2000, now at Penn State, Alan and David with their colleagues Paul Amato and Stacy Rogers collected data from a new cohort of 2084 married respondents in the US who answered the same items again on the phone via random-digit dialing. They called this cohort the Work and Family Life Study. I trained on these data; my early work with Miles Taylor on the honeymoon-as-ceiling effect and trajectories of marital happiness and conflict came out of the original cohort.

I kept ruminating about how cool it would be to collect a third cohort. I would read articles speculating about how marriage had changed in the US, but we were lacking rich, historical and contemporary data on marriage to test these claims. So with funding from the National Institute on Aging, Miles Taylor, Wendy Manning, and I collected a third repeated cross-section.

The Work and Family Life Study 2022 was fielded in collaboration with Gallup using a combination of their random-digit dialed and address-based sampled panel and recontact samples. We fielded the third wave in 2022–23 and collected data – on the phone – from 2002 married adults in man-woman marriages. They answered the same items as their 1980 and 2000 counterparts. Because in 2022, same-gender couples can also get married, we fielded an online arm of the study that included 715 heterosexual respondents in man-woman marriages, 426 non-heterosexual respondents in man-woman marriages, 327 respondents in same-sex marriages, and 169 respondents who were in non-cis-gender marriages. We also fielded an online supplement that included the full sample of respondents including the telephone and online samples (n = 2899). .

What we’re learning

Our first study using the new telephone data is currently under review. Everything about who marries has changed in ways that should have made marriages better. As is well documented, compared to 1980, today’s married population is older, more educated, less likely to be remarried, and more likely to have cohabited first. Wives are more likely to be employed. Husbands do more housework. We also find that decision-making is more equal, and traditional gender attitudes have faded. By most theories on marriage, these shifts predict happier marriages.

But we have found that marital happiness did not change. Across forty years, marital happiness was flat — while divorce proneness rose significantly, and marital interaction, the time spouses simply spend together, declined. We did find that marital conflict declined. We are now building on this research.