Lost Income, Lost Friends — and Loss of Self-Respect
A new Pew Research Center survey finds the long-term unemployed are more likely than the short-term unemployed not only to have lost income, but also to have lost contact with close friends, suffered strains in family relations and lost some self-respect and confidence in their long-term career prospects.
The Great Recession at 30 Months
More than half (55%) of adults in the labor force say that since the economic slump began 30 months ago, they have suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers; the recession has also led to a new frugality and diminished expectations about retirement and their children’s future.
More Women Without Children
Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.
The Typical Modern Mother: There Isn’t One
Today’s mothers of newborns are more likely than their counterparts two decades earlier to be ages 35 and older, to have some college education, to be unmarried or to be nonwhite — but not all at once.
Marrying Out
A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the U.S in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new census data. Of all newlyweds in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 31% of Asians married outside their race/ethnicity. Patterns also varied by region (intermarriage is most common in the West) and by gender.
The New Demography of American Motherhood
Compared with mothers of newborns in 1990, today’s new moms are older, better educated and less likely to be white. A record 41% of births were to unmarried women; but most continue say this is bad for society.
The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household
The multi-generational American family household is staging a comeback — driven in part by the job losses and home foreclosures of recent years, but more so by demographic changes that have been gathering steam for decades. As of 2008, a record 49 million Americans, or 16.1% of the total U.S. population, lived in such a household, up from 28 million, or 12.l%, in 1980. Such households had been more common a century ago, but began to fall out of favor after World War II. Now they are coming back.
The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.
A new national survey focuses on American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium. These young people have begun to forge their generational personality: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.
New Economics of Marriage: The Rise of Wives
A larger share of women today, compared with their 1970 counterparts, have more education and income than their spouses. As a result, in recent decades the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women.
Blacks Upbeat about Black Progress, Prospects
A comprehensive new survey of racial attitudes finds that a year after Barack Obama’s election, blacks’ assessments about the state of black progress in America have improved more dramatically than at any time in the last quarter century.
