Blossfeld, H. P. (2009). Educational assortative marriage in comparative perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 513-530.
The author of the article comments that most assortative marriage research used cross-sectional data and log-linear modeling of the contingency table of wives’ and husbands’ educational levels. These macro investigations, however, produced a lot of ambiguous findings and interpretations.
The author asserts that the life course approach looks at single people throughout their lives and explicitly highlights the dynamic nature of partner decisions as well as the impact of educational roles and institutional contexts. Educational homogamy appears to be driven by three factors, according to life course studies: (a) people prefer to associate with partners who are equally educated; (b) educational expansion increases contact opportunities for equally educated men and women at a time when young people are beginning to look for partners and form couples; and (c) women’s changing economic role in dual-earner societies increases the importance of women’s education and labor force attachment.
Blossfeld, H. P., & Timm, A. (Eds.). (2003). Who marries whom?: educational systems as marriage markets in modern societies. Springer Science & Business Media.
The author demonstrated that marriage and socioeconomic inequity are inextricably linked. Marriage is influenced by the structure of marital markets, and marriage patterns have social ramifications. In this book, the author explains how the educational system became an increasingly crucial marriage market in most modern nations, particularly for individuals with advanced degrees. Unintentionally, educational growth in general and rising female educational participation in particular have raised the rate of “assortative meeting.”