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The Educational Homogamy Gap Between Married and Cohabiting Couples in Latin America

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Abstract

The explosive expansion of non-marital cohabitation in Latin America since the 1970s has led to the narrowing of the gap in educational homogamy between married and cohabiting couples (what we call “homogamy gap”) as shown by our analysis of 29 census samples encompassing eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Panama (N = 2,295,160 young couples). Most research on the homogamy gap is limited to a single decade and a small group of developed countries (the United States, Canada, and Europe). We take a historical and cross-national perspective and expand the research to a range of developing countries, where since early colonial times, traditional forms of cohabitation among the poor, uneducated sectors of society have coexisted with marriage, although to widely varying degrees from country to country. In recent decades, cohabitation is emerging in all sectors of society. We find that among married couples, educational homogamy continues to be higher than for those who cohabit, but in recent decades, the difference has narrowed substantially in all countries. We argue that assortative mating between cohabiting and married couples tends to be similar when the contexts in which they are formed are also increasingly similar.

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Notes

  1. Each of the imputed tables consists of the global 4 by 4 by 2 (male’s education, female’s education, type of union) contingency table scaled down by 10,000 to reduce the number of cases. Since all parameters were interacted, the values in these imputed tables had no effect on the other estimates. The results for these 3 unavailable samples were dropped.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this research comes from the following projects ERC-2009-StG-240978, CSO2011-24544, 2009SGR00048, National Institutes of Health R01HD044154. The authors are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and useful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics, Campus UAB, Edifici E2, Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain

    Albert Esteve

  2. Minnesota Population Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Robert McCaa

  3. Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica, Mercedes, Costa Rica

    Luis Ángel López

Authors
  1. Albert Esteve
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  2. Robert McCaa
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  3. Luis Ángel López
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Albert Esteve.

Appendix

Appendix

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Table 5 Homogamy parameters (log odds) for married and cohabiting couples, education, country, and year (Model 6)
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Esteve, A., McCaa, R. & López, L.Á. The Educational Homogamy Gap Between Married and Cohabiting Couples in Latin America. Popul Res Policy Rev 32, 81–102 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-012-9263-4

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