This article presents a review of the scholarly work relating to marital quality. Cross-cultural testing of various predictors of marital qualtiy are presented singlely as well as multiple regression analyses.

This paper examines Murdock's (1949) definitions and data pertaining to the universal functions of the nuclear family. The author asserts that Murdocks definitions and data are faulty and finds that Murdock's claims regarding the universality of nuclear families are unsupported.

This study focuses on the relationship between women's power/status and divorce. Tests of gender variables with measures of divorce highlights the importance of sexual equality in divorce frequency as well as the effect of division of labor on divorce.

This study reanalyzes the work of Barry, Bacon and Child (1957) on sex differences in child socialization. The authors use factor analysis to determine if the results of the original study are consistent with results yielded using modern methods and computer analysis. Authors find that there is no one general dimension of male-female difference in socialization and that the conclusions of Barry, Bacon, and Child have little meaning.

This study provides a reexamination of research by Barry, Bacon, and Child (1857) and Barry, Child, and Bacon (1959) on subsistence type and child socialization. Many of the previous findings are not challenged, however a factor analysis indicates that the composite indices used by the original authors lack internal validity. Results suggest that, although previous findings were not entirely inaccurate, the original conclusions were overly simplified and misleading.

This book investigates sanctions for nonmarital conceptions or birth. The author conducts cross-cultural tests for hypotheses derived from a variety of theories. Results do not support one theory over another, but suggest that variables such as sociocultural complexity, family structure, descent, fraternal interest groups, sexual inequality, and child-parent relationships all affect the consequences of illegitimacy.

This article presents a materialist approach to the study of women's status. The authors test a Marxist-feminist theory which situates women's status as the end effect in a causal chain that begins with the mode of production and is mediated by the extent to which women control production. Results point to separate, rather than confounding, effects of these two factors on the status of women.

This paper reports on a cross-cultural test of the theory that higher status of women causes higher divorce rates. This theory has typically been expressed in terms of variations in family authority or in terms of women's economic opportunities (375).

This article tests Randall Collin's 1975 theory that political-economic factors, rather than family/kinship factors, predict the degree of sexual stratification in a given society. A multivariate model is tested and findings contradict the theory.

This study explores predictors of variation in two dimensions of marital residence patterns among hunter-gatherers: 1) the tendency toward patrilocality versus matrilocality and 2) the tendency toward unilocality versus bilocality.