There have been studies that have linked family structure as a whole to the intergenerational transmission of marriage behavior (Manning et al., 2007; McLanahan and Booth, 1989). Some studies (Booth, Brinkerhoff and White, 1984; Greenberg and Nay, 1982; Jennings et al., 1992; Jones and Nelson, 1996; Wallerstein and Kelly, 1974) have incorporated crude measures of family structure, such as whether or not parents are divorced, to explain adolescent marital attitudes. Research has not taken into account how parent-child relationships act as channels for the intergenerational transmission of marriage behaviors. Additionally, researchers know less about how fathers in various family structures either hamper or promote children’s attitudes towards marriage through the parent-child relationship.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine how father involvement, in differing family structures, impacts children’s marital expectations. The social learning perspective and parental investment theory serve as the conceptual framework for ensuing analyses by emphasizing how conventional values are passed on from one generation to the next and how biological versus non-biological fathers are prompted to pass core values to their respective children. This thesis specifically examines resident father-child relationships utilizing data from waves 1 and 3 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (Udry 2003).
Overall findings suggest that most adolescents want to get married and think they have a great chance of doing so. Adolescents show increased odds of the importance of expecting to marry across various characteristics including being employed, having favorable attitudes toward marriage and being married. Adolescents who are close to their fathers and are involved in various activities with their fathers (e.g. going to church, going shopping and going to the movies) are more likely to think that it is extremely important to be married someday. But father-child communication has no significant effect on adolescent marital expectations. Notwithstanding, the effects on adolescent marital expectations from families where the father is not the biological parent are contingent on the different types of paternal involvement. Among Blacks, father-child involvement in various activities, as a measure of paternal involvement, does less to increase marriage expectations than it does among Whites.