Finally, we acknowledged the fact that relationship dynamics are perceived to be more volatile in fragile families and sometimes parents may decide to go their separate ways.
Additionally, since prior research showed that the transition to marriage selects for more economically and emotionally successful couples (Cherlin 2009), we also controlled for parental relationship status at wave 5 (when the outcome variable was measured).
Almost 62 % of the couples reported being married, and this relationship status is our reference category.
To capture the potency of an intimate partnership and respondents’ persistency in marriage after the focus child was born, we constructed an additional variable in which respondents who stayed married throughout the five waves of data collection, as well as those who became consistently married in the subsequent waves, were coded as 1.
Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics for all the variables in the analyses.