Ethnic mixtures in the United States.

Abstract

This paper used data from the 1980 US Census to examine marriage patterns among persons of mixed ethnic ancestry. The choice of mates was conceptualized as reflecting 3 possible outcomes: 1) a pattern that lies somewhere between those common compatriots with a single ancestry 2) a pattern in the direction of unmixed persons with 1 of the common ancestries or 3) a pattern quite distinctive from that found among unmixed persons of either ancestry. The census data reveal a general decline in the incidence of in-marriage particularly among Italians Poles Russians and Portuguese. However even among the youngest cohort outmarriage is still below the level that would be expected under conditions of random sorting. More detailed analysis indicates that Italians and Poles have shown a sharp decline in the percent inmarried; as a result of increasing outmarriage the offspring of mixed marriages show an even greater tendency to outmarry. In contrast the youngest cohort of women of partial German ancestry are more likely to be married to someone of at least partial German ancestry than their older counterparts. Similarly the percentage of mixed Irish women who marry someone of Irish descent is slightly greater in the under 25 year cohort than is the comparable propensity for women who are exclusively Irish. Among the English there is a substantial gap between single and mixed ancestry women in the propensity to outmarry (67% versus 41%). These data fail to confirm the speculation that mixed ethnicity leads to rapid disintegration of an ethnic influence on choice of mate although there is a shift in this direction among those of South-Central-Eastern European origin.

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