User:Picbrian

My contributions to Assortative mating page:

An Australian team from the University of Queensland utilized large databases that contain information of human physical and genetic traits: specifically observing genetic markers for traits such as height and BMI to predict these corresponding traits of their partner. Through observing the height of twenty four thousand European couples, they did find a strong correlation between both their genetic markers for height as well as their measured height. In regard to BMI, a correlation was also observed but it was a slightly weaker one. Moreover, non-physical traits were also examined. Afterwards, a  British database was used to examine roughly eight thousand couples. In this study they found an impressive correlation between partner’s genetic markers that were linked to their years of education.

In a different study provided by scholars in cooperation with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), hundred of thousands of households from 1960-2005 were taken from the United States Census Bureau and analysed. Information in regard to assortative mating patterns and a the educational attainment of couples was used to construct a contingency table. The first cell of this table contained the observed fraction of married households with the second containing the theoretical fraction that would occur if pairing was random. Ratios were then calculated from this data and revealed that there was a ratio greater than one, meaning that the number of matches between people of similar education is greater than it would be if random. Moreover, a structural model was constructed to show that over time there has been an increase of assortative mating in regard to level of schooling.

Similarly, another study by Robert D. Mare of University of Wisconsin found that marriages between people of different levels of schooling are far less likely for those who are highly educated which plays a role into the ever decreasing degree of social mobility that those who possess lower levels of education must experience in this day and age.