How Do Disadvantaged Parents View Tensions in Their Relationships? Insights for Relationship Longevity Among At‐Risk Couples*

• Date: 01 April 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2008.00489.x
• Author: Maureen R. Waller
• Published date: 01 April 2008

How Do Disadvantaged Parents View Tensions in

Their Relationships? Insights for Relationship

Longevity Among At-Risk Couples*

Maureen R. Waller**

Abstract: Drawing on longitudinal, qualitative interviews with parents in the Fragile Families Study, this paper

examines the narrative frames through which partners in stable and unstable unions viewed tensions over economic

issues, domestic responsibilities, personal problems, communication, trust, and their family and social networks.

These interviews suggest that parents in stable unions framed tensions as manageable within the context of a relation-

ship they perceived to be moving forward, whereas those in unstable unions viewed tensions as intolerable in rela-

tionships they considered volatile. Three years later, parents’ narrative frames generally guided their decisions about

maintaining or dissolving relationship, but some parents changed their interpretations in response to unexpected

positive or negative events, with important implications for union longevity.

Key Words: at-risk families, couple narratives, family stress and conflict, fragile families, union stability.

Given the instability of many cohabiting and marital

unions in the U.S. today, scholars in several fields

have been interested in understanding why some

relationships are more likely to endure than others.

Although a large, interdisciplinary literature has

identified individual, relationship, and socioeco-

nomic factors associated with couples’ decisions to

divorce or delay marriage, these factors only appear

to tell part of the story about why relationships have

changed dramatically in recent years (Ellwood &

Jencks, 2004). Some researchers have pointed to the

importance of understanding partners’ subjective

perceptions of their relationships in addition to the

objective correlates of union transitions, noting that

these explanations do not always converge (Amato

& Previti, 2003; Surra & Gray, 2000).

Previous studies have examined partners’ percep-

tions of significant stages of their relationships, such

as courtship, cohabitation, the first years of mar-

riage, the transition to parenthood, and divorce

(e.g., Chadiha, Veroff, & Leber, 1998; Cowan &

Cowan, 1992; Holmberg, Orbuch, & Veroff, 2004;

Sassler, 2004; Surra & Hughes, 1997; Vaughan,

1986). Although this literature provides important

insights into marital expectations and transitions,

couples today are forming and dissolving enduring

relationships in diverse types of unions, many of

which involve children. More than one out of three

births now occurs to unmarried parents and about

one quarter of these births are to women who are liv-

ing with their partners (Bumpass & Lu, 2000). The

majority of parents who are unmarried when they

have a child later marry their child’s other parent or

another partner (Graefe & Lichter, 2002). However,

couples who are cohabiting at their child’s birth and

those who marry following a nonmarital birth tend

to be more economically disadvantaged than those

represented in previous studies and are dispropor-

tionately African American and Latino. Although

couples who have followed a less traditional path to

*I would like tothank Renzo Tragsiel, Mabel AndalonLopez, and Jean Knab for assistance. I am also grateful to the Public PolicyInstitute of Californiaand the Bronfen-

brenner Life CourseCenter for generous support of the projectand to the editors and anonymous reviewersat Family Relations for their e xcellent feedback on this a rticle.

All errorsare those of the author alone. TheFragile Families and ChildWellbeing Study is funded by theNICHD and a consortium of other agenciesand foundations.

**Maureen R. Waller is an assistant professor in the Department of Policy Analysis & Management, 257 MVR Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 (mrw37@

cornell.edu).

Family Relations, 57 (April 2008), 128–143. Blackwell Publishing.

Copyright 2008 by the National Council on Family Relations.

family formation have received increasing policy

attention in recent years because of their fragility, we

have limited information about how they view some

of the factors that enable and constrain relationship

longevity (Fein & Ooms, 2006).

This study fills an important gap in the literature

by using a unique set of longitudinal, qualitative

interviews with mothers and fathers who partici-

pated in the Fragile Families Study to examine how

a diverse sample of cohabiting and married parents

who had a nonmarital birth interpreted tensions in

their relationship or issues that parents identified as

causing stress or conflict between them. Specifically,

this study had two aims. The first aim was to distin-

guish between how parents in stable unions, or those

unions that remained intact during the study, and

parents in unstable unions, or those that dissolved

during this time, interpreted tensions in the early

stages of their relationships. Therefore, the first stage

of the analysis draws on interviews conducted with

parents 1 year after having a child together to inves-

tigate how parents in stable and unstable unions per-

ceived these tensions through a narrative frame

(Small, 2002), or filter, that made them seem more

or less tolerable. The second aim of the study was to

examine the stability of parents’ interpretations dur-

ing the early years of their child’s life and to investi-

gate how these interpretations were related to union

longevity. As such, the second stage of the analysis

drew on longitudinal information from interviews

with parents when their focal child was age four to

examine the conditions under which they main-

tained or changed narrative frames and how these

interpretations guided parents’ decisions about their

relationships.

The Risk of Dissolution in Contemporary Unions

Demographic trends in marriage and family forma-

tion point to a recent separation of reproduction

and marriage in economically disadvantaged com-

munities. Ellwood and Jencks (2004) observed that

as women with higher educational levels delayed

marriage and childbearing, women with less educa-

tion delayed marriage only, leading to a higher pro-

portion of births outside of marriage. These changes

have disproportionately affected African American

families but have also occurred in Latino and White

families (Ellwood & Jencks).

Recent data also show a growing proportion of

nonmarital births occur to two-parent, cohabiting

couples (Bumpass & Lu, 2000), but cohabiting rela-

tionships tend to be short lived for disadvantaged

couples because they neither dissolve nor transition to

marriage (Lichter, Qian, & Mellott, 2006). Although

marriages are typically more stable than cohabiting

unions, the relationships of disadvantaged women

who have a nonmarital birth prior to marrying are

also quite fragile (Ellwood & Jencks, 2004). Research

indicates that about 29% of women who had a previ-

ous nonmarital birth dissolve their marriages within

5 years, and they are more than twice as likely to

divorce during this time as other women (Bramlett

& Mosher, 2002). As with the incidence of non-

marital childbearing, the likelihood of divorce also

differs substantially by education and race, with

non-Hispanic White women and those at higher

educational levels having a lower risk of dissolution

(Ellwood & Jencks).

Perceptions of Relationship Formation

and Dissolution

Although the demographic literature indicates that

disadvantaged couples in nontraditional unions ex-

perience greater challenges to relationship longevity,

we have limited information about how they per-

ceive relationship formation and dissolution (Fein &

Ooms, 2006). In an important body of research that

analyzes the accounts of more advantaged couples

during courtship, Catherine Surra (e.g., Surra &

Gray, 2000; Surra & Hughes, 1997) identified two

general types of commitment processes prior to mar-

riage. In particular, she found that partners with

‘‘relationship-driven’’ commitments attributed steady

progression in their relationship to such things as

their interactions as a couple and positive beliefs about

the relationship, whereas those in ‘‘event-driven’’

commitments associated the volatility of their rela-

tionships with conflict and negative relationship

beliefs. Couples were also differentiated by their

social networks, trust, and compatibility as partners.

In addition to these psychological studies of close

relationships, sociologists have examined how part-

ners’ explanations of union longevity and dissolution

reflect culturally shared meanings about enduring

unions (Arendell, 1995; Reissman, 1990; Swidler,

2001). This literature suggests that partners’ inter-

pretations of the success or failure of their relation-

ship are drawn from an accessible repertoire of

accounts that allows them to make sense of their

experiences and to justify their behavior (Reissman;

Tensions Between Disadvantaged Parents Waller 129