Patterns of union formation among urban minority youth in the United States

Since 1990, several large surveys of sexual behavior have been conducted. In addition to collecting general information on sexual histories, such as number of partners in the previous year and whether subjects ever used condoms, these studies collected information on sexual behavior with specific partners, or 'partnerships.' The data are useful both for testing of substantive hypotheses about the determinants of behavior as well as for disease transition modeling. The objective of this paper is to use partnership histories to describe the union formation patterns of low-income youth living in Detroit. Data from the partnership histories will be used to illustrate the types of statistics that can be generated from these histories. Data will be presented on the number and types of unions (married/cohabiting, 'knew well,' 'casual'), the frequency and duration of these unions, the types of intercourse reported in each type of union, the patterns of mixing by age and ethnic group in each type of union, concurrency in unions, and condom use in unions.