BACKGROUND The universality of marriage in human societies around the world suggests a deep evolutionary history of institutionalized pair-bonding that stems back at least to early modern humans. However, marriage practices vary considerably from culture to culture, ranging from strict prescriptions and arranged marriages in some societies to mostly unregulated courtship in others, presence to ...

Married foreigners On 1 January 1999 the Netherlands was home to 453 thousand married couples with at least one partner born in a foreign country (table 1). Less than half of these couples consist of partners who were both born in a foreign country. 108 thousand foreign-born males have a Dutch-born wife and 133 thousand foreign-born females have a Dutch-born husband. Since 1992 the number of th...

The purpose of this qualitative study, conducted in two Navajo Nation chapters, was to learn what makes Navajo marriages strong because no research has been done on this topic. Twenty-one Navajo couples (42 individuals) who felt they had strong marriages volunteered to participate in the study. Couples identified the following marital strengths: (1) maintain communication, (2) nurture your rela...

It has been known for a long time that patients suffering from rare diseases following a recessive mode of inheritance are, in a high proportion of cases, offspring of marriages between related partners who themselves are healthy. In such cases varying percentages of 'consanguineous marriages' have been reported. Such figures are useful as a general orientation. The great differences found betw...

The effects of consanguineous marriages on couples' fertility and sterility were explored through an interview survey of 20 626 women, chosen randomly from the rural and urban areas of the North Arcot District of Tamil Nadu State. Qualified women investigators obtained relevant information about reproductive performances of all married women resident in well defined rural and urban samples chos...

The stable marriage problem is a well-known problem of matching men to women so that no man and woman, who are not married to each other, both prefer each other. It has a wide variety of practical applications, ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals, to matching students to schools, or more generally to any two-sided market. Given a stable marriage problem, it is possible to find a...

The status exchange hypothesis suggests that partners in black/white marriages in the United States trade racial for educational status, indicating strong hierarchical barriers between racial groups. The authors examine trends in status exchange in black/white marriages and cohabitations between 1980 and 2010, a period during which these unions increased from 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent of all y...

This article investigates the major issues facing interracial marriage from the perspective of individuals currently in these unions. Differential assimilation is used as a conceptual model to focus this exploration. The research methodology employs a qualitative approach based on open-ended questions embedded in a larger survey questionnaire administered to a national non-random sample of inte...

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education - divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adol...

Increases in interracial marriage have been interpreted as reflecting reduced social distance among racial and ethnic groups, but little is known about the stability of interracial marriages. Using six panels of Survey of Income and Program Participation (N 1⁄4 23,139 married couples), we found that interracial marriages are less stable than endogamous marriages, but these findings did not hold...