Marriage Is ‘Hot’
No, marriage ain’t what it used to be. In fact, according to Dr Susan Brown, co-director of the new National Center for Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, it’s hot.
There have been so many rapid changes in family structure in recent decades that people have become fascinated by families, she says, because of curiosity – they wonder if their experiences are similar to others. “Marriage is a hot topic.”
The university and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) obviously agree – providing a $5.5 million budget to the project over the next five years.
The idea is to bring researchers and policymakers together, as well as to learn leading practices in marriage education and train the next generation of marriage scholars.
Dr Wendy Manning, the other co-director and a sociology professor at BGSU, sasy that the American family is complicated, and a lot of children are experiencing a diverse set of families.
And as families have become increasingly complex, researchers are racing to keep up, addressing such questions as how diverse living arrangements affect individual well-being and what divorce and remarriage mean for children and adults.
Raw statistics show increases in the percentage of children born out of wedlock and the average age of first marriage, but the important questions such data raise are about how those trends impact the health and welfare of individuals, families and communities.
“Family structure plays a critical role in the well-being of children and families,” says Melissa Pardue, deputy assistant secretary for human services policy at HHS. “The National Center for Marriage Research will help us determine why healthy marriages are so important and what we can do to further promote them. Just as important, it will ensure the future of high-quality marriage research by training a new generation of scholars and building strong research capacity.”
In addition to the relationship between family structure and well-being, the center’s researchers will look at:
- how family processes and resources mediate that relationship;
- factors associated with formation and maintenance of healthy marriages/relationships;
- how adolescents make the transition to healthy marriages;
- pathways of family formation outside marriage and how those families compare with married families,
- and the roles of marriage education programs in supporting healthy marriages and well-being.
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