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Title: In Search of a New Family Form: The Distribution and Duration of Shotgun Cohabitation
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Rackin, Heather
Gibson-Davis, Christina
In Search of a New Family Form: The Distribution and Duration of Shotgun Cohabitation
Presented: Atlanta GA, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2010
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): Cohabitation; First Birth; Marital Status; Marriage; Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Shotgun marriage in which a marital union occurred post-conception but pre-birth has largely disappeared from the family formation landscape. Here, we identify a new type of relationship that may have supplanted shotgun marriage: shotgun cohabitation, in which couples began cohabiting after conception but prior to the birth. We use data from the first ten rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey 1997 (NLS97) to analyze household relationship types at the time of a first birth. We find that 12% of parents are in a shotgun cohabitation relationship, compared to 6% in a shotgun marriage. Shotgun cohabitations also account for nearly one-quarter of all unions. Contrary to expectations, relationships which began as a result of a pregnancy were not more likely to dissolve than relationships that did not. However, both shot-gun cohabitations and cohabitations that existed before a birth dissolved much faster than both types of marriages.
Bibliography Citation
Rackin, Heather and Christina Gibson-Davis. "In Search of a New Family Form: The Distribution and Duration of Shotgun Cohabitation." Presented: Atlanta GA, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2010.