Summary
Summary readings week 3 (Huschek, Kalmijn, Skopek & Blossfeld, Stevens)
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Summary of all the readings of week 3 from the second year sociology course 'Life Courses, Family and Health'.
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Summary readings LFH week 3Stevens, G., Owens, D., & Schaefer, E. (1990). Education and
attractiveness in marriage choices.
This study investigates marriage choices along two dimensions: physical attractiveness and
education. Little evidence of a trade or exchange between attractiveness and education in marriage
choices is found.
There is a very strong association between spouses’ educational characteristics and physical
attractiveness. Education is generally considered to be emphasized more heavily by women than by
men. Physical appearance is emphasized more heavily by men.
The studies bypass the possibilities that physical attractiveness and education are independent and
nonsubstitutable attributes in the marriage market, and that the exchange is not sex-specific if the
two characteristics are substitutable.
There is no evidence found that men or women are able to trade educational attainment for
attractiveness in the marriage market.
Conclusion
- There is a great deal of similarity between spouses’ levels of physical attractiveness and
between their levels of educational attainment. Attractive people tend to have attractive
spouses; highly educated people tend to have highly educated spouses.
- There is little evidence for the substitutability of attractiveness for education in the marriage
market. People do not seem to benefit from being highly attractive in regard to acquiring a
highly educated spouse.
- There is little to suggest a sex-specific trade-off between education and attractiveness
- Previous research on this particular application of exchange theory under-emphasized the
importance of homogamy in considering physical attractiveness.
- General conclusion: physical attractiveness plays a large and an approximately equal role in
marriage choices for men and for women. Our results suggest strongly that homogamy is the
major theme in the story of attractiveness and education in marriage markets: (un)attractive
women tend to marry (un)attractive men, and parallel situation occurs with economically
relevant characteristics.
Skopek, J., Schulz, F., & Blossfeld, H. (2011). Who contacts whom?
Educational homophily in online mate selection.
Problem: despite numerous studies reporting empirical evidence favouring either the structural or
the intentional mechanisms of mate selection, we still don’t know how structural opportunities and
individual strategies actually operate together.
Research question: is educational homogamy primarily a consequence of the structure of the
educational system, and thus, simply an institutionally preformed phenomenon? Or is educational
homogamy more a result of homophily, implying that it is actors making intentional choices who
systematically want to associate with similarly educated partners?
Goal: study the relevance of education for contact behavior on the digital marriage market.
First step: actor’s propensity to initially contact other users in the online dating environment.
Second step: analyse the reply behavior to initial contacts in online dating.
, Rationally acting individuals on the market will strive only for relations with an optimal cost-benefit
balance: the higher the value of one’s own resources, the higher the value of resources one can
reasonably demand from possible partners. Rational actors try to ensure that they do not sell
themselves at less than fair value, thereby systematically rejecting potential mates with lower
resources.
Hypothesis 1: users would be more likely to send an initial contact offer to an equally educated user.
Not rejected.
Hypothesis 2: users would be more likely to reply to a contact offer from an equally educated user.
Not rejected.
Hypothesis 3: educational homophily would be higher for actors with higher educational status.
Not rejected.
Hypothesis 4: both men and women systematically avoid a couple constellation in which the woman
is better educated than her male partner.
Rejected.
Homophily is the main mechanism of mate selection in online dating.
Conclusion
- Main result: importance of homophily for the formation of intimate relationships.
- H1+2: the social structures and normative rules of mate selection from everyday life continue
to affect people’s choices even in such an open setting as the internet. Closing social
structure in the process of modern mate selection
- H3: homophily increases significantly with level of education.
- H4: the observed educational patterns are almost identical for initial contacts and replies.
- In the deviation from homophily: strong evidence for the asymmetric mechanisms of mate
selection associated with the traditional bourgeois family model.
- Individuals show educational homophily from the very beginning of mate selection. Thus,
studying individual strategies will expand our understanding of assortative mating beyond
bare macro-structural explanations.
Kalmijn, M. (1998). Intermarriage and homogamy: Causes, patterns,
trends.
Goal:
- Theoretical section review micro- and macro-level hypotheses about the causes of
intermarriage and homogamy and to put these into a general theoretical framework
- Empirical section summarize patterns, variations, and trends in intermarriage
Theoretical section: three social forces of marriage patterns:
1. Preferences of individuals for certain characteristics in a spouse (individual level)
- Based on socioeconomic resources
- The pattern of homogamy: preference to marry a resourceful spouse
- Cultural resources: preference of similarity
- Preferences for socioeconomic and cultural resources do not by themselves translate into
homogamy and endogamy with respect to social characteristics.
2. Influence of the social group of which they are members (group level)
- Two ways in which third parties prevent exogamy: by group identification and by group
sanctions
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