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Using complementary methods to test whether marriage limits men's antisocial behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2013

Sara R. Jaffee ,
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi  and
Rebekah Levine Coley
Sara R. Jaffee*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania King's College London
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi
Affiliation:
Boston College
Rebekah Levine Coley
Affiliation:
Boston College
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Sara Jaffee, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Married men engage in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men, but it is not clear whether this reflects a causal relationship. Instead, the relationship could reflect selection into marriage whereby the men who are most likely to marry (men in steady employment with high levels of education) are the least likely to engage in antisocial behavior. The relationship could also be the result of reverse causation, whereby high levels of antisocial behavior are a deterrent to marriage rather than the reverse. Both of these alternative processes are consistent with the possibility that some men have a genetically based proclivity to become married, known as an active genotype–environment correlation. Using four complementary methods, we tested the hypothesis that marriage limits men's antisocial behavior. These approaches have different strengths and weaknesses and collectively help to rule out alternative explanations, including active genotype–environment correlations, for a causal association between marriage and men's antisocial behavior. Data were drawn from the in-home interview sample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a large, longitudinal survey study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the United States. Lagged negative binomial and logistic regression and propensity score matching models (n = 2,250), fixed-effects models of within-individual change (n = 3,061), and random-effects models of sibling differences (n = 618) all showed that married men engaged in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men. Our findings replicate results from other quasiexperimental studies of marriage and men's antisocial behavior and extend the results to a nationally representative sample of young adults in the United States.

Type
Special Section Articles
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 25 , Issue 1: Gene–Environment Correlation in Developmental Psychopathology , February 2013 , pp. 65 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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