A counterfactual choice approach to the study of partner selection

Background: Research on assortative mating - how partner characteristics affect the likelihood of union formation - commonly uses the log-linear model, but this approach has been criticized for its complexity and limitations. Objective: The objective of this paper is to fully develop and illustrate a counterfactual model of assortative mating and to show how this model can be used to address specific limitations of the log-linear model. Methods: The model uses a sample of alternate counterfactual unions to estimate the odds of a true union using a conditional logit model. Recent data from the United States are used to illustrate the model. Results: Results show important biases can result from assumptions about the marriage market implicit in existing methods. Assuming that spouses are drawn from a national-level marriage market leads to underestimates of racial exogamy and educational heterogamy, while the exclusion of the unmarried population (the unmarried exclusion bias) leads to overestimates of these same parameters. The results also demonstrate that controls for birthplace and language endogamy substantially affect our understanding of racial exogamy in the United States, particularly for Asian and Latino populations. Conclusions: The method gives the researcher greater control of the specification of the marriage market and greater flexibility in model specification than the more standard log-linear model. Contribution: This paper offers researchers a newly developed technique for analyzing assortative mating that promises to be more robust and flexible than prior tools. Further, it demonstrate best practices for using this new method

Comments on Conceptualizing and Measuring the Exchange of Beauty and Status

This is a working paper of a comment that is now available in the American Sociological Review 82(5):1293-1299. The code (but not the data) to reproduce this analysis, as well as my own output, is also available at: https://github.com/AaronGullickson/beautyexchange In this comment, I identify two methodological issues in McClintock’s (2014) article on beauty exchange. First, McClintock’s difference models, which find no evidence of exchange, are poor measures of exchange that fail to account for important confounders and rely upon an overly narrow conceptualization of exchange. Second, McClintock codes her log-linear models to find a difference in the effect of men and women’s beauty in exchange rather than the total effect of women’s beauty, which is both statistically significant and substantively large

The Diverging Beliefs and Practices of the Religiously Affiliated and Unaffiliated in the United States

Since 1990, the percent of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown substantially. Prior work has shown that between 1990 and 2000, the religiously unaffiliated population also became more religious in belief and practices, both in absolute terms and relative to the affiliated population. This curious empirical finding is believed to be driven by a dilution effect in which moderate believers disaffiliated from organized religion without giving up religious beliefs and practices. In the current article, I use data from the General Social Survey to show that this convergence of beliefs and practices of the religiously affiliated and unaffiliated ended around 2000. Since 2000, the religiously unaffiliated have decreased their belief in god and the afterlife, and have not increased their prayer frequency. The trends for the affiliated have been either increasing or unchanging and thus the religious practices and beliefs of the religiously affiliated and unaffiliated have diverged since 2000. The change in trend for the religiously unaffiliated after 2000 cannot fully be explained generational succession or the growing percentage of Americans raised without religion. Although the unaffiliated remain very heterogeneous in their beliefs and practices, these results point to a growing religious polarization in the United States

Comments on Conceptualizing and Measuring the Exchange of Beauty and Status

In this comment, I identify two methodological issues in McClintock’s (2014) article on beauty exchange. First, McClintock’s difference models, which find no evidence of exchange, are poor measures of exchange that fail to account for important confounders and rely on an overly narrow conceptualization of exchange. Second, McClintock codes her log-linear models to find a difference in the effect of men’s and women’s beauty in exchange rather than the total effect of women’s beauty, which is both statistically significant and substantively large. </jats:p

Patterns of Panethnic Intermarriage in the United States, 1980-2018

Intermarriage among ethnic groups belonging to the same panethnic category (e.g. Asian, Latino) is an important indicator of the strength of panethnicity. Yet, most of the work on panethnic intermarriage uses older samples with significant data limitations. In this article, I use data on recently married couples from the American Community Survey 2014-18 and Census 1980 to analyze the likelihood of ethnic exogamy within the panethnic categories of Latino, East/Southeast Asian, and South Asian. I utilize a counterfactual marriage model that accounts for group size within local marriage markets, eliminates immigrants married abroad from analysis, and controls for birthplace and language endogamy. The results show that birthplace and language diversity are significant barriers to ethnic exogamy among Asians but not Latinos. Once birthplace and language endogamy are held constant, panethnic intermarriage is far more likely among Asians than among Latinos. East/Southeast Asian ethnic exogamy has increased over time, while Latino ethnic exogamy has not. Furthermore, East/Southeast Asian and South Asian intermarriage remains rare, suggesting that panethnic intermarriage among Asians occurs within two separate melting pots.</p