Thus far we’ve relied primarily on data from the U.S. Census and other similar sources (for example, the American Community Survey). These sources offer historical continuity and large sample sizes, but they generally offer only limited information about women’s marital histories and background characteristics. Moreover, they almost certainly underestimate the size of racial gaps in marital instability, as black women tend to transition more slowly than white women do from separation to legal divorce.9 For our final look at contemporary marriage patterns, we now turn to a smaller data set, the National Survey of Family Growth, to get a better sense of how women’s accumulated life experiences of marriage vary across race, ethnicity, and nativity. This data set contains retrospective histories on the formation and dissolution of cohabiting and marital relationships for a nationally representative sample of women aged 15–44. Table 2 displays these results.
