Week 4: Discussion questions

Kalmijn (1991)

1. What does homogamy mean? What about endogamy? Are homogamy and endogamy forms of group closure? What about preferences?

2. What are the effects of educational achievement and ascriptive status on marriage? 

3. Given the convergence of males and females in terms of education in U.S. and the secular increase in education, what are your guesses about the effect of education on age at marriage, time of search and costs of search? 

4. Do you believe that better women's socioeconomic resources are seeing as increasingly attractive to men? How this is related with the findings of this article?

5. Why does the use of synthetic cohorts may bias the analysis of homogamy?

6. What does intrinsic homogamy means? Does it have any relationship with Rogoff ratios?

7. The author argues that marriage selection can be regarded as a combination of intrinsic homogamy (tendency to marry people equal in status) and avoidance of distance (the likelihood of marriage decreases with increases in status distance between individuals). What are the effects of this marriage pattern to the social stratification and its dynamic over time? How equal access to education can influence the social stratification through marriage?

8. How do you interpret the result that education is increasingly important on marriage selection in U.S. and the increase of the individualism (decrease of familism)?

9. How is your explanation to the 'farm effect' (stronger tendency for people from farm backgrounds to marry with someone of the same background)? Is this an indication that local marriage markets matter?

10. Do you believe that more homogamous couples are less likely to divorce? Finally, to what extent changes in homogamy or heterogamy during marriage (or cohabitation) have an effect on the probability of divorce?

Mare(1991)

1. What are some of the major implications of the tendency for persons with similar amount of schooling to marry one another? Let's think about the reasons why sociologist and demographers are interested in understanding the patterns of educational assortative mating. 

2. What kind of individual factors and structural factors affect educational assortative mating? 

3. What kind of roles does schooling play in the marriage process? 

4. Mare(1991) focuses on the timing of schooling and marriage in explaining the relationship between husbands' and wives' educational attainment over the past 50 years in the United States. In doing so, he seems to start from the assumption that "the longer the time between departure from school and marriage, the greater the chances that couples will form educationally heterogeneous marriages'. Is this assumption persuasive to you?

5. Based on the results of analysis, he concludes that relative timing of leaving schooling and marriage affects the strength of association between husband's and wife's schooling. Specifically, he says, "marriage across educational barriers generally declined until the 1970s and then increased slightly. Changes were greatest at the highest educational barriers, which are most likely to be affected by changes in the timing of marriage relative to leaving school."(p.24) What do you think about his conclusion? Do his results of analysis really show any relationship between relative timing of schooling and marriage and educational assortative mating? 

6. According to his results of analysis, some of the trend toward increased educational assortative mating remains after controlling for the relative timing of leaving school and marriage. What other factors do you think affect the tendency of educational assortative mating? How would such factors as women's participation in the labor force, fertility and cohabitation be related to educational assortative mating?

Qian (1997)

1. Why interracial marriages are sociologically relevant? How does interracial marriages influence culture and society? 

2. The author shows that most of the marriages still endogamous, even though interracial marriages are increasing. Do you think that group identification is important explaining endogamy? How do you interpret black marriage rates in this context?

3. How the relative size of a group can influence its probability to marry outside the group?

4. The author used log-linear models to control for racial and sex compositions. Pullum and Peri (1999) argue that Quian's results are not invariant with respect to the choices of reference categories for ethnic and educational affinity. Do you understand why this critique is important?

5. The author excluded immigrants. Do you think that this is a good strategy? Don't you think that the analysis of immigrants could provide an idea about the integration of immigrants in the U.S. society?

6. What is the shape of homogamy by education? 

7. Do you think that the use of Hispanics as a group is adequate? Is this an homogeneous group in terms of race?

8. The article shows that racial boundaries are harder than educational boundaries. It also shows that interracial marriages tend to be homogamous in education. How do you analyze this situation prospectively?

9. What are the evidences pro and contra Merton's exchange theory presented in this paper?

Qian & Preston(1993)

1. What do they define and calculate the force of attraction? 

2. Their results show very different pictures of marriage behavior between 1972-1979 and 1979-1987. They show that the sharp declines in marriage rates between 1972 and 1979 are not highly differentiated by age or education for either men or women while the smaller declines between 1979 and 1987 are highly concentrated among younger women. They also argue that age or education homogamy did not increase during 1972-1979 period while age and education homogamy increased during 1979-1987 period. They explain such contrast in terms of women's economic prospects. Is this explanation persuasive? What else can you think about such contrastive results?

3. How does the emergence of cohabitation affect the forces of attraction by age and education?