Social Demography: Role of Inequality and Social Differentiation

Abstract

This article discusses how four theoretical perspectives, separately and combined, have provided insights into the role of social diversity and inequality in affecting demographic behavior. The first emphasizes cultural explanations; competing somewhat with it are resource-based explanations which focus particularly on differences in opportunities and constraints. Cutting across both of these are reference group theory and life-course analysis. The Princeton European Fertility Project's (EFP) argument that the fertility transition in Europe was more a result of cultural phenomena rather than an adaptation to the changing constraints of economic development is reviewed, as well as critiques of it. The development of the innovation and diffusion hypothesis (partly a reference group model) coming out of the EFP, as well as its extension to fertility analysis in currently developing countries, is also discussed. Easterlin's relative cohort size explanation of demographic behavior is examined as an example of the combined role of changing preferences and changing economic constraints in creating feelings of relative deprivation, itself one version of a reference group model. The combination of relative economic status with innovation and diffusion models is applied to married women's rising employment in the US and the general theoretical value of relative economic status models is discussed. Finally, the combined role of socioeconomic inequalities and the life course in affecting demographic behavior is explored within two historical contexts. The first is variations in relative economic deprivation over the developmental cycle of the family in middle and working class families around the turn of the century in the US and Europe and its impact on marriage timing and the family's reliance on child labor. The second is socioeconomic differentials in the speed and difficulty of the career-entry process and their impact on male marriage timing in late twentieth century America.