Mission
The National Marriage Project (NMP) is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and interdisciplinary initiative located at the University of Virginia. The Project’s mission is to provide research and analysis on the health of marriage in America, to analyze the social and cultural forces shaping contemporary marriage, and to identify strategies to increase marital quality and stability. Pursuant to its mission, the NMP has five goals:
- Publish The State of Our Unions, which monitors the current health of marriage and family life in America;
- Investigate and report on the state of marriage among young adults;
- Provide accurate information and analysis regarding marriage to journalists, policy makers, religious leaders, and the general public—especially young adults;
- Conduct research on the ways in which children, race, class, immigration, ethnicity, religion, and poverty shape the quality and stability of contemporary marriage; and
- Bring marriage and family experts together to develop strategies for strengthening marriage.
The NMP conducts research, sponsors conferences, and public lectures at the University of Virginia, publishes reports, books and articles by family scholars, and makes its findings available to the broader public through its website, media outreach, and publications.
Features:
Latest Releases
- The State of Our Unions: The Social Helth of Marriage in America, 2007 (PDF)
- "The Evolution of Divorce" (2009)
- 2008 Update to the 2007 State of Our Unions (PDF)
- Life Without Children (PDF)
- Cohabitation, Marriage and Child Wellbeing
- The State of Our Unions: 2007
- Making a Love Connection: Teen Relationships, Pregnancy, and Marriage
- Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's testimony before the U.S. Senate
- Ignoring Teens' Romantic Lives by Marline Pearson
In the News
- Twentysomethings Relational Wasteland
- To Have, To Hold, For a While
- Wilcox profiled as one of four of the nation's "next conservative thinkers" in The Boston Globe
- The Real Pregnancy Crisis
- Does True Love Wait?
- Andrew Cherlin, the Benjamin Griswold Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, will deliver a lecture, "Not So Sacred Vows: Religion and Marriage in America," at 4 p.m. in the Dome Room of the Rotunday on Wednesday, October 21, 2009