Research on divorce during the past decade has focused on a range of topics, including the predictors of divorce, associations between divorce and the well-being of children and former spouses, and interventions for divorcing couples. Methodological advances during the past decade include a greater reliance on nationally representative…

Although marital satisfaction starts high and declines for the average newlywed, some spouses may follow qualitatively distinct trajectories. Using 8 self-reports of satisfaction collected over 4 years from 464 newlywed spouses, we identified 5 trajectory groups, including patterns defined by high intercepts and no declines in satisfaction,…

Weak and counterintuitive findings linking couples' interactional processes to marital outcomes have prompted new lines of research on how marriages change. Recent findings reviewed here highlight the value of (a) expanding conceptions of marital interaction by considering how social support and positive affect moderate the effects of…

To explain wife abuse, we offer a refinement of relative resource theory, gendered resource theory, which argues that the effect of relative resources is contingent upon husbands gender ideologies. We use data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 4,296) to test three theories of wife abuse. Resource theory…

We model histories between two cohorts of urban Chinese couples (N=1,191) of a rarely studied living arrangement - coresidence with the wife's parents - using a dynamic life history analysis in contrast to previous cross-sectional studies of co-residence. We examine patterns of entry into and exit from co-residence with the wife's parents,…