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...

/pdf/birds-of-a-feather-homophily-in-social-networks-3kjmeyr23w.pdf

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.

A new occupational prestige scale, based on 116 occupational titles, is presented for the Netherlands in the 1980s. Questionnaire data from a nationwide adult survey (N = 753) were used to rank the titles according to prestige. Although data were gathered at an ordinal level, the scale itself was adapted to the interval level. For comparative purposes, scale values were also calculated in a way similar to a scale by F. van Heek et al (Sociale stijging en daling in Nederland 1 [Social Mobility in the Netherlands, Part I], Leiden, 1958), which is shown to be unsatisfactory by current standards. A key is presented enabling the researcher to assign prestige scores to all occupations listed by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics. Using these methods, data from other types of surveys can be used more intensively. 4 Tables, 36 References. Modified HA

/pdf/een-beroepsprestigeschaal-voor-nederland-in-de-jaren-tachtig-4ssofhos2z.pdf

Een beroepsprestigeschaal voor Nederland in de jaren tachtig

Classic studies in political sociology argued that differences in countries' patterns of mobility are responsible for variations in levels of class voting in these countries. In this paper the tenability of this classic claim is examined using survey data from 14 long-standing Western democracies over the period 1964–1990 (N=54 478). When testing this claim, we improved over earlier studies by employing detailed measures of class, by using multivariate statistical models that measure relative levels of class voting and by employing diagonal reference models that deal adequately with the effects of individual intergenerational class mobility. Our results show significant effects of individual intergenerational mobility. The longer mobile persons are members of a certain class the more they are apt to show the typical voting behaviour of their destination class. However, our results do not support the claim for the effects of intergenerational mobility at the macro level. Variation in levels of mobility can only to a very modest extent – if at all – be held responsible for cross-national and over-time variation in levels of class voting

The Effects of Class Mobility on Class Voting in Post-War Western Industrialized Countries.

Sociologie. Vragen, uitspraken, bevindingen

Two years after the legalization of same-sex marriages in the Netherlands, 65% of the Dutch population largely or completely disagrees with the statement “gay marriage should be abolished.” This article shows, by way of multinomial logistic regression analysis of survey data, which socializing agents influence one’s attitude toward same-sex marriage after its legalization (FNB2003; N = 2,124). Parents’ attitudes toward homosexuality during one’s youth strongly affect one’s attitude toward same-sex marriage. The strongest determinant is socialization within religious institutions. Religious practice provides an explanation of the differences between members of denominations opposing same-sex marriage. A lower educational level enhances one’s probability of being neutral on abolishing gay marriage. Finally, men and people from non-Western origin are especially likely to oppose same-sex marriage.

/pdf/primary-and-secondary-socialization-impacts-on-support-for-3hk82sjqha.pdf

Primary and Secondary Socialization Impacts on Support for Same-Sex Marriage After Legalization in the Netherlands:

https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/2722028/KraaykampG-Cultural-2008.pdf

Wout Ultee

Papers

Een beroepsprestigeschaal voor Nederland in de jaren tachtig

The Effects of Class Mobility on Class Voting in Post-War Western Industrialized Countries.

Sociologie. Vragen, uitspraken, bevindingen

Primary and Secondary Socialization Impacts on Support for Same-Sex Marriage After Legalization in the Netherlands:

Cultural participation and time restrictions: Explaining the frequency of individual and joint cultural visits