Abstract
This sutdy examines how men and women of diverse social backgrounds end up in marriage. Social backgrounds consist of two components in this study: class origin and educatgional credentials. The former is defined as an ascriptive factor and the latter as an achieved factor. The analysis has two sections: (1) we examined the relationship between social backgrounds and the decision to get married by calculating the proportion of those who stayed single by clas origin and educatioinal credentials between men and women; and (2) among those who were married, we examined how the pattern of association by class origin and by education changed by cohort.
The analysis of the proportion of single people shows that being a single is likely to be associated with class origin among men and being a single is likely to be associated with education among women. However, there was no clear trend nor a clear mismatch in class origin or education between men and women. The analysis of the pattern of association shows a dominant pattern of homogamy, in particular, marriage among men and women who had either low-level education or high-level education. The strength of association based on education is consistently strong, and education plyas a crucial role in promoting homogamy among those with low-level and high-level education, rather than in encouraging marriage those with very different levels of education.
