Status Homogamy in the United States

TLDR

Status homogamy is used as an indicator of societal openness, according to classical social stratification theory. The study investigates marriage choice as a multidimensional phenomenon, distinguishing ascriptive (father’s occupational class) from achievement-oriented (educational attainment) characteristics. Ascriptive homogamy is measured by similarity in fathers’ occupational class, achievement homogamy by similarity in spouses’ education, and multivariate log‑linear models are applied to assess their relative importance and test a shift from ascription to achievement. The results show that educational homogamy is a stronger and increasingly important boundary in marriage selection than social‑class origins, while ascription has become a less significant factor.

Abstract

According to classical works on social stratification, status homogamy can be regarded as an indicator of the "openness" of society. In contrast to previous approaches, this article treats marriage choice as a multidimensional phenomenon and makes a distinction between ascriptive- and achievement-oriented characteristics. Ascriptive status homogamy is measured by the similarity of spouses with respect to their fathers' occupational class, while the achieved dimension of status homogamy is measured by the similarity of spouses' educational attainment. Multivariate log-linear models are used to explore the relative importance of these factors for the choice of a spouse, and the article tests the hypothesis that there has been a transition from ascription to achievement in patterns of marriage selection. This study first demonstrates empirically that previously conducted synthetic cohort analyses of educational homogamy suffer from selection biases and then, using the Occupational Change in a Generation (OCG) surveys, analyzes two real marriage cohorts. The analyses show that education is a more important boundary in marriage selection than social-class origins and that educational homogamy has increased over time. At the same time, there is some indication that ascription has become a less important boundary in marriage selection.