Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather, flock together - so the old adage goes. Well, indeed, this idea has proved a staple of sociological wisdom for a good long time. Some call it ‘assortative mating’, but for me, that sort of terminology is more zoological and I prefer, ahem, marital endogamy. Yes, that sounds rude, but it just means that people tend to marry others from a similar social background. Now, that could mean a similar class, religion, ethnic group, or region, so these things aren’t set in stone. There’s a nice piece of journalism on this topic on the BBC News Magazine. Back in the 1980s a sociologist called Roger Penn - now at Lancaster University - did a study on marital endogamy in the UK. Penn used his study to show how marriage simply reproduced the boundaries of the class structure over a very long period. What I particularly liked about that study was that Penn managed to show how something ‘hidden’ in many ways - class - in fact structured people’s lives in a profound way, right down to the details of their choice in marriage partner.

The BBC article shows something similar happening in terms of ethnicity.

And of course, that’s a really interesting area for some coursework, isn’t it?