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Multivariate techniques are used to examine the influence of mothers sexual experiences as teenagers on their teenage childrens current sexual behaviors. Little of the demonstrated relationship is transmitted through differential attitudes or communication patterns of mothers with differing early sexual experience. For girls there is a reason to believe that the correlation between the mothers early behavior and the daughters current behavior is transmittedd partly via their giological relationship. The population for this study comprizes junior high school students in an urban area of a southern state. The average age of the students was about 14 with age span of 11 to 17 years of age. By race 36% were white males 13% black males 38% white females and 13% black females. Cross-tabulations and correlations are used to explore the relationship between the mothers early behavior and the teenagers current behavior. This research has confirmed the hypothesis that the sexual behavior of the mother when she was an adolescent is related to he current sexual behavior of her child. For boys insisgnificant amounts of influence by mothers early experience are mediated either via the sons developmental atiming or via the mothers attitudes toward sexuality.

The author tests the hypothesis that the inverse relationship between marital happiness and disruption will be strong under conditions of high marital alternatives and weak under conditions of low marital alternatives. Using micro data from a sample of 400 white urban American couples with wives under 35 years of age he finds no support for the hypothesis. (authors)

Trends in premarital coitus were examined by cohort analyses of samples of white and black women living in 16 U. S. cities. The data suggest (1) increases in premarital coitus for each successive cohort, with the most rapid increase appearing for those age 15-19 in the late 1960s; (2) these increases were not attributable to changes in socioeconomic status; and (3) lower rates of premarital coitus among whites than blacks for all cohorts, regardless of socioeconomic status. The findings are compared with the Kinsey data.

The relationship between female work force participation and fertility has been well documented for United States whites and samples from other countries. It has been asserted that the fertility differential between working and nonworking females is a result of the more frequent use of contraceptives by the working females. This paper has two purposes. First the relationship between work and fertility is investigated for both white and black females. Second the relationship between female work and fertility is found to be strong and essentially the same for blacks as for whites. The only relationship found between female work and contraceptive use was among women of zero parity. This finding was weak however and required tenuous assumptions. (authors)

Using longitudinal data from a panel of married, white, urban couples from 16 United States urban areas, this paper explores the usefulness of "marital alternatives" as a dimension in explaining marital stability. A scale is employed to measure the respondents'perception of how much better or worse off they would be without their present spouse, and how easily that spouse could be replaced with one of comparable quality. Even when taken independently, the dimension of marital alternatives appears to be a better predictor of marital disruption than is marital satisfaction. Marital alternatives correlate positively with resources of the self and negatively with spouse's resources. The marital alternatives concept appears to be useful in understanding the social psychology of marital stability.

This study attempted to determine whether ideal mate images actually influence mate selection. The mate perceptions of 90 engaged persons were compared with the ideal mate conceptions of single, unengaged persons precision-matched to the engaged individuals on personality characteristics. Analysis of personality and perception correlation matrices lead to the observation that mate perceptions of engaged persons, although highly inaccurate, bear little resemblance to the ideal mate conceptions of unengaged single persons. The mate actually selected has different personality relationships to the self than the ideal mate has, and is perceived as having different relationships to the self than are conceived between the ideal mate and the self. It is concluded that the ideal mate images are therefore probably of little importance in mate selection; neither are they a salient feature in the perception of the selected mate.

One hundred fifty engaged couples were administered personality tests and mate perception tests and then were followed up over a period of five years to determine whether they married or broke the engagement. Using discriminant function analysis, the investigator measured the contributions of individual personality, personality match, and mate perception to discriminating those who married from those who broke up. No contribution was found for individual personality, personality match, accuracy of mate perception, or perception of mate similarity, for either sex. However, engaged men who married did attribute some different traits to their female partners than those who broke the engagements.