Nativity, Ethnic Origin and Education: Assortative Mating and Family Formation among Jewish Households in Israel

Jon Anson, Retraité
Nava Dihi, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Ofra Anson, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Choosing a partner is a critical process in social formation and reproduction. It matches not only individual compatibility, but also the material, cultural and social resources (capital) that each brings to the joint household. A major question, then, in assessing the way society is structured, is the pattern of assortative mating by which households are formed. In the present work, we analyse the composition of 138,541 Jewish Israeli partnerships taken from the census of 2008. We tabulate the social characteristics of the men and the women in the partnership, focussing on country of birth, educational certificates and country of origin (ethnicity). Each of these is strongly endogamic, but they are also closely intercorrelated. We therefore use log linear analysis to consider their relative importance in couple formation, and find all three to be important in their own right. Subsequent analysis considers differences between the religious and the non-religious populations, as well as the effects of parental differences in origin and nativity, and age hyper- and hypogamy, though these analyses are limited by sparsity of numbers in many of the cells. We conclude with a discussion of long-term implications for the structuring of Israeli society.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Big data

See extended abstract.