Bridging Alone: Religious Conservatism, Marital Homogamy, and Voluntary Association Membership

This study characterizes social insularity of religiously conservative American married couples by examining patterns of voluntary associationmembership. Constructing a dataset of 3938 marital dyads from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, the author investigates whether conservative religious homogamy encourages membership in religious voluntary groups and discourages membership in secular voluntary groups. Results indicate that couples’ shared affiliation with conservative denominations, paired with beliefs in biblical authority and inerrancy, increases the likelihood of religious group membership for husbands and wives and reduces the likelihood of secular group membership for wives, but not for husbands. The social insularity of conservative religious groups appears to be reinforced by homogamy—particularly by wives who share faith with husbands

Friends, Neighbors, and Coworkers at Midlife

with Friends, Neighbors, and Coworkers at Midlife People have always relied on their friends, neighbors, and coworkers as well as family members for social support, but support from outside the family may be increasingly important as high divorce rates persist and high levels of residential mobility continue to take people away from their relatives. Past research suggests that women give and receive more emotional support than do men, but little research has explored gender differences in overall patterns of exchanging social support. We use latent class analysis of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to show that there are four major patterns of social support exchange for both men and women at midlife. Three of these patterns—high exchange, emotional support exchange, and low exchange—are very similar for men and women. However, almost half of men can be characterized as low exchangers while almost half of women can be characterized as emotional support exchangers. Around 10 percent of both men and women are high exchangers. Multivariate analyses show that among both men and women, the unmarried are the most likely to be high exchangers after controlling for other factors that might possibly be related to th

Occupational Dissimilarity between the American Indian/Alaska Native and the White Workforce in the Contemporary United States

Who has which job? When this answer differs by race group or sex, inefficiencies such as labor market discrimination or suboptimal investment in education may be impeding productivity and sustaining inequities. We use US Census data to analyze the occupational structure of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) workers relative to non-Hispanic white workers. Relative to white workers, AI/AN workers are generally overrepresented in low-skilled occupations and underrepresented in high-skilled occupations, especially men and single-race AI/AN workers. AI/AN occupational dissimilarity does not appear to have declined substantially since 1980. Sex-specific multivariate analyses do not remove the significant inequalities in observed occupational outcomes