By Obianuju Mbah, Christian Today. (Image: Unsplash)
A new study has challenged decades of academic and policy assumptions about the role of marriage in family stability, arguing that its benefits have been significantly underestimated.
The report, “The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution”, was produced by the Marriage Foundation in partnership with the Centre for Social Justice and is based on the doctoral research of Dr Harry Benson at the University of Bristol.
The study examines whether lower rates of relationship breakdown often associated with marriage are primarily the result of factors like income, education and age, or whether marriage itself contributes to relationship durability.
According to the report, previous influential studies, including work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), concluded that married couples were more likely to stay together largely because they tended to be older, wealthier and better educated than those who cohabit.
Dr Benson argues that these studies were methodologically flawed and that they substantially underestimated the independent role of marriage.
“My analysis of the entire sample, using improved state-of-the-art methodology, shows that marriage accounts for half or more of the gap in union dissolution,” he writes in the report.
The research uses data sourced from the Millennium Cohort Study, which followed 18,827 children born between 2000 and 2002 in the UK through their early teenage years.
Dr Benson analysed a representative sample of more than 3,300 couples over a 14-year period and controlled for 27 factors, including age, education, income, religion, housing tenure and smoking habits.
The findings suggest that couples who marry before having children experience substantially lower rates of separation than couples who never marry.
By their child’s fourteenth birthday, parents who had never married faced a separation rate almost twice (45%) that of those who had married before their first child was conceived (26%).
Dr Benson suggests this may reflect what commitment theorists describe as “sliding” into marriage under social or family pressure, rather than making a deliberate commitment earlier in the relationship.