Low‐Income Childless Young Adults' Marriage and Fertility Frameworks

• Date: 01 August 2017
• Published date: 01 August 2017
• Author: Christina M. Gibson‐Davis,Heather M. Rackin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12405

H M. R Louisiana State University

C M. G-D Duke University∗

Low-Income Childless Young Adults’ Marriage

and Fertility Frameworks

The authors investigated how low-income young

adults without children understand marriage

and fertility. Data come fromthe Becoming Part-

ners and Parents Study (N=69), a qualitative

study of African American adults aged 18 to

22 in a mid-size southern city. This is the rst

study to analyze young, low-income, childless,

and unmarried Black respondents’ frameworks

(i.e., internal understandings of the world) of

marriage and fertility. In contrast to research

conducted on parents, this research on child-

less adults indicated a narrative in which there

were close connections between marriage and

fertility and an economic bar adhered to both

marriage and childbearing. Respondents also

believed that childbearing was meaningful and

provided purpose, but that it was morally ques-

tionable if the parent was not nancially stable.

The results suggest that prior ndings related to

meanings of family formation and childbearing

for low-income parents may not extend to those

without children.

Marital births are rare among economically

marginalized minority adults: In 2014, 91% of

births to Black women with a high school degree

Department of Sociology, Louisiana State University;126

Stubbs Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (hrackin@lsu.edu).

∗Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, 228

Rubenstein Hall, Box 90312, Durham, NC 27708.

Key Words: African American, fertility, low-income, mar-

riage, parenthood, young adults.

or less were nonmarital (authors’ calculations,

using National Vital Statistics data). Because of

the rarity of marital births, a number of quali-

tative studies have investigated why marriage

and childbearing have become theoretically and

temporally disconnected among this subgroup

(Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Gibson-Davis, Edin,

& McLanahan, 2005). These studies found

that marriage became associated with nancial

prerequisites that acted as a barrier to marriage,

but did not hold for fertility because low-income

parents believed that nancial well-being had lit-

tle bearing on their ability to raise children. The

differing economic expectations of marriage and

fertility, when coupled with the high importance

placed on parenthood by poor women and men,

resulted in low-income individuals transitioning

to parenthood but delaying marriage (Edin &

Kefalas, 2005; Edin & Nelson, 2013; Smock,

Manning, & Porter, 2005).

These qualitative studies have become inu-

ential in the family formation literature because

they have illuminated the meaning-making

frameworks that low-income individuals ascribe

to marriage and childbearing. Meaning-making

frameworks refers to the latent constructs that

people use to understand themselves and their

larger world; they form the internal scaffold-

ing through which individuals absorb new or

unexpected experiences and help put those expe-

riences into context (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs,

2006; Park, 2005, 2010). The work by Edin

and others suggests that low-income individuals

act in accordance with frameworks in which

marriage and fertility are disconnected, nancial

1096 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (August 2017): 1096–1110

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12405