Ethnic and generational differences in partnership patterns among Asians in the United States

ABSTRACT

Despite extensive research on the changes in partnership formation patterns in the United States over the past few decades, we know relatively little about how Asians are approaching marriage and cohabitation in early adulthood. Using the 2014–2018 American Community Survey, we examine whether Asians are delaying marriage and whether their postponement of marriage is offset by a rise in cohabitation. When doing so, we pay close attention to variations by ethnicity and immigrant generational status. We find that there is a substantial generational decline in marriage among Asians, accompanied by a relatively small increase in cohabitation. Thus, it is likely that 1.5-generation and U.S.-born Asians are waiting longer to enter coresidential partnerships than Asians who immigrated to the U.S. after age 12 and U.S.-born whites. Also, there are ethnic variations: cohabitation is rare among Indians whereas it is more common for Japanese and Filipino/as. The distinct patterns of 1.5-generation and U.S.-born Asians suggest that they are selectively acculturating. Overall, our findings demonstrate that Asians should not be treated as a monolithic group when studying their demographic and social patterns.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian Americans
• immigration
• assimilation
• ethnicity
• marriage
• cohabitation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Isabel Gil Everaert, Maggie Fay, James Raymo, Susie Tanenbaum, Van Tran, Anna Zhelnina, anonymous reviewers, and the editor of JEMS for their thoughtful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This was not the case for pre-1965 Asian immigrants. Earlier generations of Asian immigrants were denied the rights to form families due to discriminatory immigration laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924 (Kitano et al. 1984).

2 The singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) is the average length of single life expressed in years among those who marry before age 50 (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2013).