Journal of Biosocial Science · 1983 · 79 citations · 6 references
Social SciencesDemographyFamily DemographyGerontologySocial DemographyMarital Status AnalysisMarriageAge Of SpousesCoital TimingCorrelationLongitudinal Correlation StudyMarriage Decline
The study began with wives aged up to 44 years. The study seeks to explain why marital coital rates correlate more strongly with wives’ age than husbands’ age, attributing this to the tighter link between wives’ age and marriage duration. The authors argue that the stronger correlation arises because wives’ ages vary less at marriage, making them a tighter proxy for marriage duration than husbands’ ages. The study found that marital coital rates drop sharply—halving within the first year and again after about 20 years—contradicting the idea that they are closely tied to female hormone levels.
Cross-sectional and longitudinal study begun in 1974 of a large U.S. urban sample confirms that mean marital coital rates decline very rapidly over the 1st year of marriage. They seem to halve over the 1st year of marriage, and they they take perhaps another 20 years to halve again. This pattern of decline is interpreted as evidence against the suggestion that coital rates are closely related to female hormone levels. The higher correlation of marital coital rates with wife's age than with husband's age, it is argued here, is because wife's age is more closely associated than husband's age with duration of marriage (here seen as the most important of these 3 variables in the determination of coital rates). This is because of the substantially smaller variance of wife's age at marriage than husband's age at marriage. Maximum age at the beginning of the study was 44 for wives.
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Plasma testosterone level and sexual behavior of couples
Harold Persky, Harold I. Lief, D. Strauss et al. · Archives of Sexual Behavior · 1978 · 145 citations
Medicine, Endocrinology, Psychology +14