The article should be freely available online so no comment's really necessary here, but I'll include a paragraph which describes its methodology:
[5] The new role and function of marriage in the contemporary western cultures in which Anglophone romance books are produced and consumed beg a range of questions about (and a critical assessment of) the representations of marriage in current examples of the genre. This paper proposes some possible answers formed in response to the results of an ambitious survey of depictions of marriage in 150 Mills & Boon romances produced between 1984 and 2004. These novels have been systematically assessed according to a set of critically engaged criteria that relate specifically to marriage in order to accurately ascertain percentages of repeated representations and outcomes in the narratives. Given that the typical consumer of romance reads voraciously, these statistical results are likely to be more indicative of the reader’s experience of the genre than a close analysis of a smaller range of texts. As readers of romance commonly attest, the plots of such novels tend to blur as a result of replications of genre conventions, therefore this larger scale approach provides an effective strategy for accessing and interrogating the issues at stake.
Marriage is not the only issue studied. For example: "only 18% of texts from 1984 to 1994 mentioned contraception. Between 1994 and 2004, however, contraception figured in 51% of the novels, demonstrating a greater social awareness of contemporary issues relating to sexual safety and responsibility."
The article should be freely available online so no comment's really necessary here, but I'll include a paragraph which describes its methodology:
Marriage is not the only issue studied. For example: "only 18% of texts from 1984 to 1994 mentioned contraception. Between 1994 and 2004, however, contraception figured in 51% of the novels, demonstrating a greater social awareness of contemporary issues relating to sexual safety and responsibility."