Current Sociology

Marrying someone from an outside group deserves more sociological attention since it may lead to an unstable or even conflicting relationship for the prospective couple. In spite of such a risk, many people still choose to marry someone from an outside group. Traditionally, scholars in the area of social stratification have considered homogamy to be an indicator of social closure. Sociologists have also focused on the status resemblance of marriage partners in that it indicates the extent of social rigidity. However, instead of focusing on status homogamy, this study examines the heterogamy of marriage patterns, which is an alternative way of revealing the degree of social openness. Heterogamy is a more powerful indicator of social openness than homogamy because certain types of heterogamy have to defy the expectations of and/or opposition from the marriage partner’s family, community or society, and such instances can be conceptually interpreted as crossing the strongest social boundaries between social groups. Marriages crossing the boundaries of age, education, social origin and ethnicity have been regarded as the four major types of heterogamy. This study uses binary logistic and multinomial logistic models to explore the relative effect of the factors that contribute to cross-boundary marriages. Using data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, this study demonstrates that certain factors, such as achieved status (education), contextual characteristics (timing of marriage, setting of contacts) and ways of making acquaintances with the prospective spouse have contributed to cross-boundary marriages. Although achieved status and personal traits both have strong effects on the likelihood of heterogamy, social backgrounds and the process of meeting/courting also have a substantial impact on the formation of cross-boundary marriages in Taiwan.

This study uses Burt’s theory of structural holes and Lin, Fu and Hsung’s theory of position-generated networks to examine a hypothesis about the overlap of couples’ social networks and the degree of joint behaviour in conjugal role relationships. The authors devised five overlap types of couples’ networks based on two-dimensional network characteristics: the diversity of ego’s kin ties and the degree of cross-linkages through spouse’s contacts. They measured the conjugal role by how couples manage their day-to-day expenditure and classified them into three categories: mainly managed by wife, mainly managed by husband and joint management. This study used the 2001 Taiwan Social Change Survey to test the hypothesis on the couples’ networks and conjugal roles. After controlling for all other variables, the overlap types of the couples’ social networks still had significant effects on their management of family expenditure. Specifically, the couples with high diversity of ego’s kin ties and high cross-linkages through spouse practised the joint conjugal role pattern of family expenditure. The reason is that the high diversity of ego’s kin ties provides plural patterns of conjugal roles to be identified and the high cross-linkages through the spouse provide the bargaining power from the spouse.

This article studies the determination of married women’s employment discontinuity in Taiwan. Many studies have demonstrated that a high proportion of married women leave their jobs because of marriage, pregnancy, or childbirth (MPB). This article suggests the concept of labour market segmentation be brought back into the study of women’s employment stability. Using nationwide sampling data from the 2001 Taiwan Social Change Survey, the article analyses how job status and sociocultural factors affect women’s various decisions to quit their job. By using multinomial logistic analysis of over 900 married women, the author discovers that job status of both wives and husbands, husbands’ ethnic background and gender-role attitudes have significant impacts on women’s reasons to quit. Labour market segmentation by gender significantly affects the employment stability of married women. The results indicate a complex decision-making process when married women struggle to hold onto their jobs in this East Asian society.

Using corresponding couple data from Taiwan, Shanghai and Hong Kong, the main goal of this article is (1) to explore the conjugal consistency or disparity in marital values and in perceptions of marital relations among three Chinese societies; (2) to compare the relative importance of conjugal disparity vs personal factors in the explanation of marital relations reported; (3) to delineate the effect of demographic pairing in contrast with the effect of value discrepancy of couples in the perceptions of marital relations. Findings indicate that despite the high consistency percentage of perceptions of marital relations on the aggregate level, there exists a substantial amount of inconsistency among Chinese conjugal pairs. Taiwan couples are relatively more consistent than their counterparts, and Shanghai couples have the lowest estimated consistency value. Marital value is examined by conjugal priority and gender-role values. The cross-society comparison shows that Shanghai couples have more westernized values in both indices, Taiwan couples reveal the most traditional pattern of conjugal priority, while Hong Kong couples have more traditional gender-role values, particularly relating to the mother’s role. Taiwan couples also enjoy higher consistency measures. To answer whether conjugal disparity affects perceptions of marital relations - especially whether disparity in the background or in values makes a significant difference, the results generally support the expected negative relation, but vary depending on the context examined. Both personal and pairing factors are important in the account of subjective perceptions of marital relations. With regard to conjugal disparity, it is found that discrepancy in demographic background seems to be more significant than value disparity. In fact, the expected relation between value disparity and unsatisfying marital relations only receives support among Taiwanese wives. The article concludes the importance of the conjugal unit in the study of marital relations. Future studies are suggested to include both objective and subjective indicators of conjugal disparity. Specification of different patterns in each Chinese society is encouraged.

This article investigates the care support pattern of the middle-aged sandwich generation towards their elderly parents. Unlike most western reports, Hong Kong adult sons reveal an active participation in the actual behaviour of care of their elderly parents, especially in financial and emotional support - not much less than their female sibling counterparts. This article further compares the perception of care responsibility from the receiver’s vs the giver’s perspective. The results show consistent findings between values towards elderly care and actual care behaviours received from the parents’ side, in which the sons are expected and are acting as the major caregiver, much more so than the daughters. However, inconsistent results are found regarding the major responsibility towards various family members between the two generations. Adult children tend to take their own children (or the third generation) as the top priority of their family responsibilities, while elderly parents come in second and their own spouse comes third. The pattern of elderly support in Hong Kong is argued to be a product of patriarchal norms within a changing gendered societal context. The author contends that the pattern can be explained by the interaction of blood relations with a gendered division of labour.

There is a stereotypical view that East Asian cultures value familism and filial piety, regarding elderly dependence on children as morally desirable. The present study, examining postwar Japan as a case, shows that the social changes this country has undergone have transformed people’s attitudes such that more and more people are seeing elderly dependence on children as less desirable. It is suggested that in order to understand attitudinal changes towards intergenerational relationships in postwar Japan, two research frameworks are necessary: one that takes public welfare systems into consideration as a context where such relationships are placed, and another that distinguishes financial dependence from dependence for personal care. Examining surveys conducted in the last four decades, it is argued that attitudes towards finance changed far earlier than those towards personal care did, and that these attitudinal changes are closely related to the extent to which public welfare systems have developed.

Based on a review of recent research literature, major value-practice conflicts toward elderly care in China are explored, some commonalities and differentiations of real practices with traditional values are presented, the emerging new values in intergenerational relationships are discussed, and the theoretical underpinnings of interdependency are examined. Some sociologists had predicted a continuing decrease in family interdependence and caregiving. In the current globalization of economic development and concurrent trends in demography, family formation and life course, families interact and support each other over extremely long periods of time. Intergenerational relationships reflect both values and practice. There have been remarkable differences between values of people in different societies and yet some similarities of practice. Examples from the People’s Republic of China are given to illustrate the dynamics of expectation, interaction and assessment of interdependence. Implications for future programs based on global trends tend to be similar although societies are quite different.

In this study, adult daughters from an East Asian culture (South Korea: N = 398) and a western culture (Germany: N = 313) were compared with respect to the extent and the direction of intergenerational support, the associations between value orientations, relationship quality and intergenerational support, and with respect to the meaning of perceived reciprocity within these processes. Results showed a more extensive exchange of support in the Korean as compared to the German sample and very similar associations between values and relationship quality with support to parents in both cultures. However, in the German sample a negative association between adult daughters’ perception of giving more than receiving and the quality of the relationship was indicated. The results are discussed in light of the Confucian concept of filial piety and the western theoretical model of intergenerational solidarity.