Marital Status and the Duration of Joblessness among White Men

The Career Development Study (CDS) surveyed 6729 male and female public high school juniors and seniors in Washington state during the 1965-66 academic year about their demographic backgrounds social psychological information high school experiences and plans for the future. 86% completed the classroom-administered questionnaire. The CDS was designed to explore the individual-level determinants of access to careers and the relationships between transitions made by adolescents as they move into adulthood. Contact was reestablished in 1980 with more than 98% of the original participants 91% of whom provided usable responses to second-round questions about all educational family military and work experiences since high school. The authors use data for 2851 white men in the CDS to study the effect of marital status upon their duration of joblessness. Only about 2% of the CDS sample is nonwhite. The data also indicate that married men were slightly less educated than single men. Multivariate analysis found that after leaving employment married men spend significantly less time unemployed than do single men. Marital status is therefore a significant predictor of the length of time spent without a job with married men in any given month being 50-100% more likely to take a job than single men. Chronic joblessness is apparently associated with a set of unmeasured characteristics either behavioral or social-psychological. The authors have assumed that married men return to employed status faster than single men because they feel responsible for providing for their families and because they have the emotional support of their wives. More research however is needed to determine whether those factors are truly behind the comparatively more rapid return of married men to the workforce after periods of joblessness. Additional research is also needed to determine the proximate mechanisms through which marital status is related to length of joblessness.