Shifting Boundaries: Trends in Racial and Ethnic Homogamy Within Cohabitation and Marriage.

Patterns of interracial and interethnic marriage are well documented, but we know less about parallel processes within cohabiting unions and how these patterns have changed over time. To the extent that patterns of homogamy differ between marital and cohabiting unions, such differences could help elucidate the social boundaries of race and ethnicity, as well as the meaning of cohabitation. We document trends in racial and ethnic homogamy within cohabitation and in comparison to trends for marital homogamy. To do so, we utilize 20 years of data from the March supplements to the Current Population Study and identify cohabiting unions with Casper and Cohen's (2000) Adjusted-POSSLQ. Descriptive statistics demonstrate that the cohabiting unions are less homogamous than marital unions, but that the trends in homogamy for marital and cohabiting unions shift in parallel. We find important differences in racial homogamy across racial/ethnic groups and across family type. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]