Spatial and Institutional Contexts of Educational Assortative Mating in Sweden

Jesper Lindmarker , The Institute for Analytical Sociology
Benjamin Jarvis, The Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University

Intimate relationships are formed within the social and spatial contexts that structure everyday life. Education is central to these contexts: it not only shapes individuals’ social status and cultural orientation but also organizes where people live, work, and with whom they interact. While extensive research has shown that educational assortativity in partner choice contributes to the reproduction of inequality, less is known about how the spatial and institutional organization influences these patterns. This study examines how the geography of residence and work, and the structure of educational and occupational institutions, shape opportunities for meeting and partnering within and across educational boundaries. We use Swedish full-population register data between 1991 and 2022 that provide residential and workplace or school coordinates at a 100-by-100-meter resolution. These data allow us to measure not only whether partners share the same institution but also the physical distances between their homes, workplaces, and cross-domain locations. We estimate conditional logit models that compare each observed union to counterfactual pairings among the single population. This design adjusts for relative group sizes, ensuring that estimates of educational homogamy account for the actual geographic distribution of potential partners. Finally, we simulate counterfactual scenarios to examine how these mechanisms contribute to observed patterns of educational assortative mating. By integrating residential, workplace, and institutional proximity within a unified framework, the study distinguishes how education shapes partner preferences and, more fundamentally, structures the spatial and organizational opportunity structures through which unions form.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues