Do you think that marriage could make one act maturely? This research suggests so.
Researchers have found that teenagers and young adults who expected to get married within the next five years reported committing fewer delinquent acts in the next year than those who weren’t thinking about getting married.
According to Rachel Arocho, lead author of the study and a research fellow in human development and family science at The Ohio State University: “You may start to act married even before the wedding,”
Claire Kamp Dush, co-author and professor of human sciences at Ohio State said: “Just the expectation of marriage may be enough to change some people’s behaviour.”
The participants were asked in 2000 and 2001 to estimate the percent chance that they would be married in five years. They were also asked whether they had committed certain delinquent acts – including property theft, personal assault, drug dealing and property destruction – since the last time they were interviewed for the study.
On average, participants in 2000 thought there was a 43 percent chance they would be married within five years, increasing to 48 percent in 2001.
In 2000, there were 1,492 young people in the study who reported any delinquent acts and they averaged 1.74 such acts in total. In 2001, participants reported slightly fewer delinquent acts, with 1,273 reporting an average of 1.62 incidents of misconduct.
The key finding was that young people with higher marital expectations in 2000 had lower levels of delinquent activity in 2001.
The results show the importance of marriage in today’s society.
The study appears online in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
S.O.Z