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European Sociological Review Advance Access published online on April 16, 2009
European Sociological Review, doi:10.1093/esr/jcp021
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Economic Resources and Remaining Single: Trends Over Time

Pearl A. Dykstra and Anne-Rigt Poortman

Correspondence: Pearl A. Dykstra (to whom correspondence should be addressed), Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, PO Box 11650, 2502 AR The Hague, The Netherlands. Email: dykstra{at}nidi.nl

Correspondence: Anne-Rigt Poortman, Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, PO Box 80140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands. Email: a.poortman{at}uu.nl

An influential hypothesis in family research is that having many economic resources decreases women's and increases men's rate of entering a union. A more recent hypothesis is that the strength of the association between economic resources and union formation has weakened over time, given decreasing role differentiation by gender. Rather than looking at the timing of union formation, we look at its non-occurrence. Using the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, we find that, as predicted, high-resource women and low-resource men are more likely to remain single. Contrary to predictions, university-educated men are also more likely to remain single. The association between economic resources and permanent singlehood shows little change over time. Several explanations for this unexpected finding are discussed.

Manuscript received: January 1, 2008.


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