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

Differences in the Risk of Grade Retention for Biracial and Monoracial Students in the United States, 2010 to 2019

Understanding how outcomes for biracial individuals compare with those for their monoracial peers is critical for understanding how patterns of racial inequality in the contemporary United States might be shifting. Yet, we know very little about the life chances of biracial individuals because of limitations in most available data sources. In this article, I utilize American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2019 to examine the risk of being clearly behind expected grade among biracial and monoracial K-12 students, helping to fill a gap in our understanding. With large sample sizes for most biracial groups, I am able to estimate grade retention risk for biracial students with enough precision to differentiate even modest differences in risk relative to monoracial groups. The results indicate that for most biracial groups, biracial students have risk similar to their lower-risk monoracial constituent group. Although biracial students tend to have favorable family resource characteristics, controlling for these characteristics does little to change the overall placement of their outcomes

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

Since 1990, the percentage 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 by 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