While it is often argued that parents' ability to steer their offspring's partner choice is decreasing, the main argument here is that the parental influence is substantially underestimated when only considering their influence through the parents' involvement in the partner choice process. Instead parents also have a substantial indirect influence that has barely been considered within previous research. This indirect influence relates to the intergenerational cultural transmission within the socialization process. Therein parents pass on the central elements of their culture and thereby shape their children's partner preferences and ultimately their partner choice. The focus within this dissertation lies on the transmission of attitudes towards mixed unions, religion and religiosity, collectivistic orientations, and language.
The first, theoretical part of this dissertation contains a thorough review of the literature with regard to the two central topics of intergenerational cultural transmission and immigrants' ethnic partner choice. Hypotheses and a theoretical model of the parental direct and indirect influence on their children's ethnic partner choice are deduced from the theoretical considerations and previous empirical findings.
In the second part of this dissertation, these hypotheses and the theoretical model are then analyzed and tested empirically in two separate studies. The first study investigates the parental influence on the ethnic partner choice of adults with a migratory background in Europe on the basis of data from the TIES survey. The second study investigates the ethnic partner choice of adolescents with a migratory background in Europe on the basis of the CILS4EU survey. Both studies are structured analogously to make them comparable. The results for the most part confirm the substantial indirect influence parents have by passing on their culture to their children. However, this indirect influence does not seem to affect all partner choices in the same way. It does not seem to be relevant for adults' so-called transnational unions, i.e., with a co-ethnic partner from the country of origin, as well as for the choice of a member from another ethnic minority group
