Steven Nock passed away on January 20, 2008. He was a Commonwealth Professor, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Marriage Matters project. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusettes-Amherst in 1976. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he was on the faculty of Tulane University, and then at the National Academy of Sciences.

Mr. Nock authored books and articles about the causes and consequences of change in the American family. He has investigated issues of privacy, unmarried fatherhood, cohabitation, commitment, divorce, and marriage. His most recent book, Marriage in Men's Lives won the William J. Good Book Award from the American Sociological Association for the most outstanding contribution to family scholarship in 1999.

He focused on the intersection of social science and public policy concerning households and families in America.

Mr. Nock taught courses on the family at the introductory and advanced undergraduate, and advanced graduate levels. He has team-taught graduate courses on the family in the Department of Psychology. He also offered courses on quantitative methods, statistics, and demographic techniques. He won the 1991-1992 All-University Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award.

His latest research was the Marriage Matters project which examines the legal innovation known as Covenant Marriage in Louisiana, Arizona and Arkansas. In these states, couples wishing to marry must choose betweent the: standard regime of a marriage governed by no-fault divorce laws, and a Covenant Marriage regime, which is governed by fault-based divorce laws. The latter is more difficult to enter and more difficult to dissolve. This ongoing project, funded by the National Science Foundation and other sources, seeks to determine the role of law in marriage by following a large sample of newly married individuals in each type of marriage for five years.

 

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