A Social Space Approach to Testing Complex Hypotheses: The Case of Hispanic Marriage Patterns in the United States

Abstract

Where do individuals identifying as Hispanic fit in the racial landscape of the United States? The answer offered by past work is complex: The empirical results do not lend themselves to simple interpretation as no single hypothesis fits the Hispanic case very well. Instead, Hispanic integration is described as mixtures of different archetypical hypotheses, like panethnic formation, white assimilation, and racialized assimilation. My goal is to develop a formal framework to help make sense of this complex picture. I extend past work by showing which combination of integration processes (panethnic formation, white assimilation, etc.) best characterizes Hispanic marriage patterns. I make two analytical contributions. First, I organize past Hispanic hypotheses, both archetypical and blended, into a single theoretical framework defined by the salience of race and Hispanic ethnicity. Second, I parametize this theoretical framework using latent social space models. In this way, I am able to specify a set of interconnected, complex hypotheses in a tractable manner. I follow past work and use marriage/cohabitation data to test the hypotheses. Using American Community Survey data (2010)(2011)(2012), I find that Hispanic marriage/cohabitation patterns suggest high salience on both race and Hispanic ethnicity. Thus, categories like black-Mexican or white-Cuban represent relationally distinct social categories-distinct from both non-Hispanic racial categories (e.g., black or white) and Hispanic categories of a different racial identity.

Network Effects in Blau Space: Imputing Social Context from Survey Data

“…In this way, demographic characteristics are seen less as the properties of individuals, and more as social contexts, acting as loci for socially defined and transmitted information. We would thus move to a spatial, relational view of our core demographic variables (Smith 2017) — a view that is consistent with much sociological theory (e.g., Bourdieu’s (1972) version of habitus) but is at odds with how demographic variables are typically used in practice.…”

“…The fact that homophily affects virtually every type of relationship in virtually every social dimension allows us to use social (i.e., Blau) distance as a proxy for those ties, drastically simplifying the problem of measurement created by the adjacency matrices discussed above. In essence, the homophily principle simplifies the set of adjacency matrices (based on the full population and multiple relations) to a single matrix of social distances which captures important systematic aspects about the flow of information in a population (see also Smith 2017).…”

The Role of Skin Color in Latino Social Networks: Color Homophily in Sending and Receiving Societies

“… 10. See Smith (2017) for a related finding using Latinos’ racial self-classification rather than skin color and intermarriage or cohabitation rather than network composition. …”