Educational Heterogamy and Marital Satisfaction Between Spouses

In choosing marriage partners, we generally look for someone with similar status characteristics to our own. This paper suggests that status inequalities may be hypothesized to make a difference in marital satisfaction. Using the couple as the unit of analysis, the effects of educational heterogamy on marital satisfaction were investigated. Using ordinary least-squares regression, we found that when husbands had more education than their wives, both partners reported less than happy marriages with more disagreement and less positive feedback. Conversely, when the wife had more education, both partners reported more satisfaction with the marriage. Using results from the ordinary least-squares regression, a two-stage least-squares model was estimated. In this more complete model, the strongest effect on each partner\u27s marital satisfaction was the feedback regarding the other partner\u27s happiness within the marriage. Possible explanations for these findings are presented. We argue that longitudinal studies, using the couple as the unit of analysis, are essential if we wish to study the processes of marital interaction between spouses

Bringing Social Class Home: The Social Class Genealogy and Poverty Lunch Projects

Although sociologists frequently utilize the concept of social class, discussions about the issue can lead to perfunctory references to the role of education, occupational prestige, and income as the variables used to measure social class. This paper provides an overview of social class, poverty, and welfare issues, as well as two in-class projects designed to inject realism and creativity into the study of these subjects. The first project involves a genealogical exploration into students\u27 own social class backgrounds, as well as their childhood perceptions of social class and racial hierarchies. The second project is a Poverty Lunch, and involves a class-selected meal that uses the poverty line to budget for food costs (i.e., currently about 96 cents per person per meal). These projects accomplish several different goals: first, they broaden students\u27 understanding of their own families\u27 social class histories, which highlights the relevance of the sociological imagination, that is, understanding the intersections of biography and the particular historical moments we are born into; second, they help students understand the politics, history, realities, and challenges of the poverty line ; and third, the projects build a sense of community and collaborative learning in the classroom

The Walking Wounded: Employees\u27 Perspectives on Mergers and Acquisitions

Several popular and academic works have reiterated Marx\u27s concern over the issue of social class polarization in capitalist societies. Marx characterized this polarization as the increasing concentration of wealth and poverty in the upper and lower classes, respectively, coupled with a disappearing middle class. Building on these ideas, other work suggests a process of fragmented polarization with an increasing economic, political, social, and psychological diversity within each social class. This paper illustrates this process of class fragmentation, and shows that even though the upper class is gaining overall, there are segments which are beginning to feel the effects of economic restructuring. We address corporate restructuring in the form of mergers and acquisitions and how upper-and-middle managers perceive these processes and outcomes. We conducted 33 interviews with individuals from different organizational levels, involved in four different mergers or acquisitions. We focus on the meaning these individuals attribute to these processes and changes. Although most respondents remained with the new company, all were faced with major changes in their work environment. Respondents often experienced a breach of social contract, a dramatically altered perception of managerial control and decision making, a shift from corporate loyalty to self-interest, and new forms of power and resistance. We conclude by discussing the implications of such class fragmentation, and suggest directions for future research and policy

The Colors of the Rainbow: Children\u27s Racial Self-Classification

In this paper, I argue that children\u27s racial self-classification and their views of their friends reflect much more complex social reality than adult conceptions may acknowledge. This research emphasizes that in certain spheres, children have much less racist conceptions of the world than do adults. In general, social psychologists have argued that adults develop cognitive categories to simplify or categorize, but in so doing they lose a sense of the individual\u27s qualities in the process. This work argues that life experiences can be a negative factor in social development, and that children\u27s racial self-classification and racial attitudes are more socially holistic than adults\u27 perspectives. By not categorizing people on the basis of their skin color, children allow other\u27s actions to speak louder than their physical appearances

Ideas and Institutional Change in Social Security: Conversion, Layering, and Policy Drift

In recent years, social scientists such as Kathleen Thelen and Jacob Hacker have introduced new concepts to assist in the understanding of institutional change. Fostering some of these concepts, this article proceeds to augment the theoretical debate on institutional change in social science and policy research. A discussion of Social Security development in the United States advances the article's main objective: to uncover the relationship between ideational processes and policy development. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.