(Australia-NewsWire.Com, July 02, 2013 ) Victoria, Australia -- A new study conducted at Pennsylvania State University by graduate student Katherine Johnson as well as sociologists Laurie Scheuble and David Johnson looked at name-changing attitudes over time. Very few women, in general, want to keep their birth name. Ninety to ninety-eight percent of women change their name when they get married. No official national statistics are kept on the subject and most private surveys take place on the East coast, where net incomes are greater than the national average. The researchers from Pennsylvania State wanted to get their data from a different region than the Eastern coast.
Additionally, they wanted to compare the data over time, so they correlated data from two separate surveys taken at a small Midwestern university. One of the surveys was conducted in 1990 and the other in 2006. The sample size was less than 1000, which is not big enough to represent the entire nation but the study data does have the advantage of time comparison. The 1990 survey sampled 258 men and woman and the 2006 survey sampled 246. The researchers then conducted a survey of 369 students from Pennsylvania State for regional comparisons. The survey consisted of two questions. First, whether they planned to keep their birth name when they get married. Second, whether they considered women who keep their birth name less committed to their husbands.
The results showed that Midwestern views are becoming more conservative. Students in this area were three times more likely to say those women are less committed when they keep their name in 2006 than in 1990. Midwestern women are also less likely to keep their name than Eastern women are -- 4.3 percent and 11.6 percent, respectively. The ratio of Midwestern women who intended a name change and those that did not remained the same.
Only 2.7 percent of those surveyed agreed that women who change their name are less committed in 1990. That figure jumped to 10.1 percent in 2006. Midwestern men and women would seem to be more conservative in 2006 than in 1990. Similar responses were recorded for Easterners in 2006. Woman who did plan to keep their names did not believe they would be less committed to the relationship. The attitude shift between the two dates was mostly in women who planned to change their names.
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