Role Expectations When Entering into Marriage

Abstract

lower in rank, despite their wealth. Acquisition and disposition of money are a complex outcome of many factors; only in homogeneous areas, and then very indirectly, does income correlate with differentiation. However, the basic deficiency of the social class approach, from the present point of view, is that it talks of classes-strata-and yet is satisfied to use a ranking of families divided by arbitrary cutting points as a measure of the community hierarchy. From this error follow many unhappy consequences. It is then foreordained that stratification will seem like a layer cake or a ladder to success, two notions heavily laden with implicit value judgments. Moreover, this rigid scheme rarely includes ethnic groups or farmers. The possibility of delineating a diversity of subcommunities with complex interrelations is excluded by the method. Secondly, theory is hung up on the problem of why such an ordering of families exists. Given the confusion of this order with the structure of the community as a whole, the question rapidly becomes: Why are some families accorded more status in a community than others? The possibility that the whole question is simply an artifact of ordinal scales and a confusion in unit of