American Couples Study

The American Couples study was funded by the National Science Foundation, and its signature book, American Couples: Money, Work and Sex, was published by Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz in 1983. The book and subsequent academic papers were the result of more than a decade of gathering data from over 12,000 heterosexual and same-sex couples, obtained from diverse groups and volunteers over the United States. The design of the study was to compare four kinds of relationships—heterosexual married couples, heterosexual cohabiting couples, gay male couples, and lesbian couples—to address two overall questions. First, is marriage different from all other kinds of cohabitation and would married couples be different from all other kinds of couples? Second, would gender be more predictive than couple type or how people behaved in intimate relationships, therefore showing continuities between husbands, male cohabiters, and gay males and between wives, female cohabiters, and lesbians? Areas of investigation included levels of [Page 93]overall satisfaction, couple durability, the importance of sex, sexual frequency, monogamy, division of labor, child raising, attitudes about money, money management, work and family attitudes, the impact of work and money on power, negotiation tactics, commitment, and durability.

The sample was nonrandom, but a stratified subsample was selected in order to look at potential differences that might be caused by the duration of relationships and other important variables. Variation in income, education, and age were also systematically introduced into the sample. Minorities were underrepresented, and differences between race and ethnic groups were not generally statistically reported.

The American Couples study was unique because it compared actual partners (rather than a sample of husbands and wives who were not necessarily married to each other) across the four kinds of couples. For many decades, it was the primary provider of comparative data on same-and opposite-sex couples in family textbooks. The raw quantitative data from the study is still housed at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and is available to scholars.

Some of the most interesting findings were about the power dynamic of couples, what created satisfaction in couples, and whether gender or type of relationship was likely to predict behavior. Overall, the authors found that money was highly predictive of power within all kinds of relationships, though least important for lesbians. Quite consistent with gender socialization, the authors found that if a gay male couple broke up, the leaving party was more likely to be the lower earning partner. This was just the opposite for lesbians—the higher earning woman was the more likely person to leave. In general, men did not like to be “provided for” and women did not like to be the primary provider.

On the other hand, institutional forces were often definitive. For example, married couples were the most likely to pool all their resources, to give the same answers on the questionnaires, to be equally committed, to have a traditional division of labor (one person predominating as the provider, the other much more in charge of domestic duties) and have longer durability. Domestic duties were more egalitarian in all three nonmarital types of relationships (the study was done before any same-sex couples had legal standing). Interestingly, however, there were many instances when the married couples and same-sex couples were more like each other than they were like heterosexual cohabiters. This was interpreted by the authors as proof of the impact of commitment: Cohabiters were much more likely to disagree about how long the relationship was going to last compared to all of the other kinds of couples. They were the least likely to pool resources of any kind and the least likely to be generous about economic sharing.

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