Update: Read transcript here.

Today, Americans are more likely to marry and to divorce than in almost any other Western nation. How has this pattern changed over the last 10 years? What are the implications for current and future generations? Johns Hopkins University professor Andrew Cherlin’s review of the research, “Demographic Trends in the United States: A Review of Research in the 2000s,” covers trends in marriage and cohabitation, divorce, fertility, children’s living arrangements, and aging. The article was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (vol. 72, no. 3, 2010). He is also the principal investigator of the “Three-City Study,” an interdisciplinary study of low-income children and their caregivers in the post-welfare-reform era, and the pilot study “Intergenerational Support in an Era of Complex Kinship.”

In a PRB Discuss Online, Andrew Cherlin, study author and Griswold Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University, answer questions from participants about family life in the United States over the past decade.