Popenoe And Dafoe Whitehead: Article Analysis

The article is titled, “The State of Our Unions,” and is written by authors, David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. The article is about observing the modern form of marriage, and also observing family life in America. The authors, Popenoe and Whitehead, explained, mostly statistically, what has been going on with the marriage over time and how it has changed in the Americans’ views. They addressed three sections in the article: marriage, divorce, and unmarried cohabitation. The overall results of the research were that the marriage trend has been decreasing enormously and both divorce and unmarried cohabitation rates are seen rising at an immense amount making it seem like marriage has lost its meaning for most of the people. The very first issue Popenoe and Whitehead addressed was marriage. Their main conclusion of the research was that the marriage trend has been going down a lot at a rate of more than 50% compared to the last few decades(390). According to the way they contributed informations in the article, both authors seem to be insinuating the fact that the meaning of marriage to people has been changing and somehow has tarnished for most of the people. In the report they have …show more content…
In the article, it has been inscribed that divorce rate isn’t as high as it used to be in 1980s, but it's still twice of the rate back in the 1960s and only declining slightly(396). They claimed statistically in the article that despite the low declination of divorce , it has shown that marital stabilities has somehow improved. They also added a section proving that the chances of getting divorce is lower than what people usually think. Them inserting both the statement and the section would mean that although divorcing rate may be really high, it doesn’t necessarily mean most of the people are willing to divorce. Both authors may be signifying that people are also taking the risks as they are getting