Comment on steven ruggles’s “the rise of divorce and separation in the United States, 1880–1990”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22839356 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H Preston (0000-0001-7038-9689, University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author), Samuel H Preston (Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6298) |
| Year | 1997 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 473-474 |
| Publication date | 1997-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Demography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0070-3370 • E-ISSN: 1533-7790 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3038302 |
| OpenAlex | W2069540616 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 6 |
ing divorced or separated and several areal labor-force indicators. He also shows that these cross-sectional associations do a reasonably good job of accounting for trends and for racial differences in the prevalence of disrupted marriages. These significant achievements are made possible by the series of public-use census samples that Ruggles has played a major role in producing and coordinating. These samples open a valuable window on the past that should be particularly useful in understanding sources of social change. That labor-force and family measures are closely connected is not surprising. These two domains dominate adult lives, and important changes in one domain should reverberate in the other. In fact, connections between some familyrelated variables and work-related variables have been demonstrated hundreds and probably thousands of times. They have become a leading research focus in the empirical social sciences, but this research is usually based on contemporary data. Ruggles reminds us that these variables are closely connected in the past as well, although the parameters to which behavior responded may have different values. His major operational decisions-to restrict the analysis to younger people, to restrict labor-force participation measures to married people, to emphasize areal indicators, and to focus on a handful of measures-all seem sensible.
Political science · Sociology · Demography · Family Dynamics and Relationships · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1999 - 2017 (19) |
| Highly cited | No |