Poor economy hampers marriage prospects.

• Position: Your Life

The decline and disappearance of stable, unionized full-time jobs with health insurance and pensions for people who lack a college degree has had profound effects on poorer working-class Americans who now are less likely to get married, stay married, and have their children within marriage than those with college degrees, a University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., study has found.

"Working-class people with insecure jobs and few resources, little stability, and no ability to plan for a foreseeable future become concerned with their own survival and often become unable to imagine being able to provide materially and emotionally for others," explains Sarah Corse, associate professor of sociology at UV and the study's lead author. "Insecure work changes peoples' nonwork lives."

The study was conducted through direct interviews and surveys with middle class men and women. Participants were white, African-American, Asian, and Latino, between the ages of 18 and 70, and with a range of educational histories. They were married, single, divorced, cohabitating, and widowed, as well as nonparents and biological and adoptive parents.

The researchers found, generally, that educated middle class workers are better able to recover from the destabilizing effects of insecure work than the poorer working class, and therefore can seek and find stability in relationships. "Marriage is becoming a distinctive social institution marking middle class status," Corse contends.

People who are living in an unsecure and unstable situation find it difficult to meet material or financial obligations and may feel that the emotional and psychological commitment required by marriage is too great a demand on top of other challenges, notes Harvard sociologist Jennifer...