Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

https://research.vu.nl/ws/files/87034982/1992_Ganzeboom_De_Graaf_Treiman_A_standard_international_socio_economic_index_of_occupational_status.pdf

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

The shadow of a hand. Jewish-gentile marriages and Jewish suicides in the Netherlands 1936-1943

Het uurloon van werkende vrouwen en dat van hun werkende echtgenoot in Australie, Canada, Hongarije, Nederland, Tsjechoslowakije, de Verenigde Staten en West-Duitsland rond 1980

/pdf/werkend-en-toch-economisch-afhankelijk-2pqgqjytv1.pdf

Werkend en toch economisch afhankelijk

A discussion of the extent that content analysis can be useful in the evaluation of causal hypotheses. The source is newspaper items. In an article entitled "The structure of foreign news" (Journal of international peace research, 1965, 1, 64-90), j. Galtung and M.H. Ruge claim that a list of events is not necessary in order to do a content analysis on what news appears in newspapers. Their theory, called "common sense perception psychology" has the weakness that the hypotheses to be tested cannot unequivocally be derived from other hypotheses, and thus causal hypotheses cannot be tested in this manner. The formation of a list of events is not practical. Other information of some type is necessary if content analysis is to be useful in the evaluation of causal hypotheses. 4 tables. P. Tiersma

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Enkele methodologische opmerkingen over de bruikbaarheid van inhoudsanalyse als vorm van toetsend onderzoek

World War II and occupational status attainment. In this study we include personal war experiences in Duncan’s path model of status attainment to answer the following research question: To what extent can personal war experiences explain the occupational status of Dutch people who experienced World War II? We expect that personal war experiences have a detrimental effect on the human capital formation, which in turn leads to a lower educational level and a lower occupational status. To test our hypotheses, we use unique individual-level data from the ‘Onderzoek naar Doorsnee Nederlanders in de oorlog’, which was conducted from 2005 to 2010 (N = 346). The results of our path analysis show that people who were forced to work in Germany or the Netherlands during the war obtained a lower educational level and subsequently a lower occupational status. Physical destruction of one’s house also has a negative effect on occupational status through education. In addition, we found some direct effects of personal war experiences on the occupational status.

/pdf/de-tweede-wereldoorlog-en-statusverwerving-4wg14zny6s.pdf

De Tweede Wereldoorlog en statusverwerving

Waarom is voor Nederland, in vergelijking met andere door Duitsland bezette landen, het percentage joodse inwoners dat tijdens de Tweede wereldoorlog werd omgebracht zo hoog? In dit verband wees de historicus Blom er op dat in Nederland maatregelen ter isolatie van Joden in zekere zin strookten met de heersende mentaliteit van verzuiling, en de socioloog Vuijsje opperde dat de omgang in eigen verzuilde kring de mogelijkheden voor Nederlandse joden om onder te duiken inperkte. In deze bijdrage toetsen we deze en andere hypothesen met gegevens voor Nederlandse gemeenten over het percentage omgekomen Joden, huwen binnen de eigen kerkelijke gezindte en nog meer zaken.

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Wout Ultee

Papers

The shadow of a hand. Jewish-gentile marriages and Jewish suicides in the Netherlands 1936-1943

Werkend en toch economisch afhankelijk

Enkele methodologische opmerkingen over de bruikbaarheid van inhoudsanalyse als vorm van toetsend onderzoek

De Tweede Wereldoorlog en statusverwerving

De Duitse bezetting, de verzuildheid van Nederlandse gemeenten, de overlevingskansen van hun joodse inwoners