Social Association and Social Inequality in Poland, 1988–2013.

The present study contributes to the study of educational and occupational homophily in marital and friendship relations in Poland. Using data from the most recent installment of an ongoing longitudinal study, the article adds to the existing body of findings on the topic and also (a) applies a novel conceptual framework to the data to obtain estimates of homophily for the different characteristics and relations, and (b) tests hypotheses specifying a link between the amount of homophily and the overall degree of inequality. The conceptual framework models homophily in terms of the probability that a member of a given group will reject an out-group member as an associate. The hypotheses build on work on the so-called Matthew effect by Slomczynski et al. (2007) and a theoretical argument derived from status and exchange theories. Empirical analyses presented in the second part of the study suggest that there has been some change in the degree of homophily, but the magnitude of that change depends on the distance separating the categories: while the estimates of the rejection probabilities for relations between distant categories are more or less stable across the period under study, we observe a decrease in homophily in social associations between categories that are close to one another in the social hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]