Marital Infidelity Summary

In the American Sociological Review, Christin Munsch investigated the effects of relative income on marital infidelity. Her article “Her Support, His Support: Money, Masculinity, and Marital Infidelity” uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 2001 to 2011 (NLSY97). She adapted several questions in the survey to infer whether any participants were unfaithful in their marriages and the relative income they made in comparison to their partner. The NLSY97 never directly asks about infidelity, so Munsch used questions regarding respondents’ marital status and sexual activity to determine if a respondent engaged in infidelity. The survey asked respondents about their marital status, number of sexual partners in the past year, …show more content…
While Wallace depicted Munsch’s findings well and even interviewed Munsch to explain the findings thoroughly, the article left out key information about Munsch’s data and a few other crucial conclusions she mentions. Munsch mentions in her article that the NLSY97 oversamples black and Latino populations, but Wallace does not note any sampling errors. In addition, Wallace does not discuss all the conclusions that Munsch describes in the study. Wallace does spend much of the article discussing how the pressure of gender roles and more working hours makes women less likely to cheat in a marital relationship, but she does not note that Munsch concluded that women who make most of the money in a couple have more money to cover up affairs. The title itself also creates a bias. By describing the husbands as “at risk for cheating,” Wallace implies that infidelity is a disease outside of personal factors. Munsch concludes that “men were significantly more likely to engage in infidelity than women,” which describes infidelity as an action within one’s personal