Neighborhoods and Assortative Mating in 20th-Century Sweden

Research on assortative mating often focuses on status achievement, particularly education, with status ascription becoming a progressively less important factor throughout the 20th century. Neighborhoods have been considered a kind of status ascription, since they are inherited from parents. Although neighborhoods can be important for preference formation for spousal characteristics and social group pressure, their influence for assortative mating has been underexplored. This study combines novel historical and contemporary geographic data from Sweden to investigate family and neighborhood status ascription and assortative mating using a life course perspective. We use longitudinal geocoded data from a medium-size town in Southern Sweden 1905-1967 and countrywide geocoded data from 1982-2023. Multinomial logistic regression is applied to investigate the influence of social class origin and neighborhood context on the likelihood of marrying a high-status spouse. Preliminary results for the 1905-67 period show that neighborhood status ascription was important for assortative mating.