'Trial Marriage': Is premarital cohabitation an effective risk minimisation strategy for marriage breakdown?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the major shifts to occur in relationship formation over the last century is the increase in the number of people cohabitating prior to marriage. In Australia, the proportion of marriages preceded by cohabitation has risen from 30% in the 1980’s to around 75% in 2003. Sociological theories of the family propose that the increasing rate of cohabitation is, at least in part, a risk-management strategy in response to the perceived risk of divorce. In a social climate where marriage is no longer guaranteed for life, cohabitation offers the opportunity for a 'trial marriage', where a couple can get to know each other, negotiate roles, and develop communication skills prior to marriage, which should, in theory, reduce the likelihood of marriage breakdown. But how effective is cohabitation as a divorce-risk minimisation strategy? The weight of evidence from developed Western countries such as Australia, the U.S., the U.K., and Canada suggests that cohabitation increases the risk of marriage breakdown rather than minimising it. On the other hand, a couple of studies provide evidence that the increased risk of divorce, when a couple cohabits prior to marriage, is smaller for younger cohorts than for older cohorts. These results suggest that the increased likelihood of divorce with premarital cohabitation is diminishing over time, lending some support to the hypothesis that cohabitation does reduce the risk of divorce. In this paper I investigate these issues further using retrospective life course data from Wave 1 of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (HILDA).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".