{"id":53988,"date":"2013-02-20T11:30:03","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T16:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53988"},"modified":"2013-02-27T10:37:22","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T15:37:22","slug":"family-race-religion-the-u-s-is-becoming-more-diverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/02\/20\/family-race-religion-the-u-s-is-becoming-more-diverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Family, Race, Religion: The U.S. is Becoming More Diverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Racialicious<\/a> and\u00a0Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Trying to summarize a few historical trends for the last half century, I thought of framing them in terms of diversity.<\/p>\n

Diversity is often an unsatisfying concept, used to describe hierarchical inequality as mere\u00a0difference<\/em>. But inequality is a form of diversity \u2014 a kind of difference. And further, not all social diversity is inequality. When people belong to categories and the categories are not ranked hierarchically (or you\u2019re not interested in the ranking for whatever reason), the concept of diversity is useful.<\/p>\n

There are various ways of constructing a\u00a0diversity index<\/a>, but I use the one sometimes called the Blau index, which is easy to calculate and has a nice interpretation: the probability that two randomly selected individuals are from different groups.<\/p>\n

Example: Religion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Take religion.\u00a0According to the\u00a02001 census<\/a>\u00a0of India, this was the religious breakdown of the population:<\/p>\n

\"1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Diversity is calculated by summing the squares of the proportions in each category, and subtracting the sum from 1. So in India in 2001, if you picked two people at random, you had a 1\/3 chance of getting people with different religions (as measured by the census).<\/p>\n

Is .33 a lot of religious diversity? Not really, it turns out. I was surprised to read on the cover of\u00a0this book<\/a>\u00a0by a Harvard professor that the United States is \u201cthe world\u2019s most religiously diverse nation.\u201d When I flipped through the book, though, I was disappointed to see it doesn\u2019t actually talk much about other countries, and does not seem to offer the systematic comparison necessary to make such a claim.<\/p>\n

With our diversity index, it\u2019s not hard to compare religious diversity across 52 countries using data from\u00a0World Values Survey<\/a>, with this result:<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The U.S. is quite diverse \u2014 .66 \u2014 but a number of countries rank higher.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Increasing U.S. Diversity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anyway, back to describing the last half century in the U.S. On four important measures I\u2019ve got easy-to-identify increasing diversity:<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"6\"<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

The last one is a little tricky. It\u2019s common to report that the median\u00a0age at marriage has increased<\/a>\u00a0since the 1950s (having fallen before the 1950s). But I realized it\u2019s not just the average increasing, but the dispersion: More people marrying at different ages. So the experience of marriage is not just shifting rightward on the age distribution, but spreading out. Here\u2019s another view of the same data:<\/p>\n

\"7\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I calculated these using the\u00a0Panel Study of Income Dynamics<\/a>\u00a0from 1968 (for those married in the years 1950-1968) and comparing it with the\u00a02011 American Community Survey<\/a>\u00a0for those married in the previous year. There might be a better way, of course.<\/p>\n

I have complained before that using the 1950s or thereabouts as a benchmark is misleading because it was an unusual period, marked by high conformity, especially with regard to family matters. But it is still the case that since then diversity on a number of important measures has increased. Over the period of several generations, in important ways the people we randomly encounter are more likely to be different from ourselves (and each other).<\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Racialicious and\u00a0Family Inequality. Trying to summarize a few historical trends for the last half century, I thought of framing them in terms of diversity. Diversity is often an unsatisfying concept, used to describe hierarchical inequality as mere\u00a0difference. But inequality is a form of diversity \u2014 a kind of difference. And further, not all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[253,260,272,3920,285,42],"class_list":["post-53988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-international-comparisons","tag-marriagefamily","tag-nation-united-states","tag-raceethnicity","tag-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53988"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54108,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53988\/revisions\/54108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}