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Intermarriage bridges different social groups. It follows that status heterogamy equalizes to certain degree different social statuses, so undermining the hierarchy of social status. Gould argues that inequality functions to reduce conflict among individuals and among groups by establishing order of precedence. Then, in a macrosociological perspective, I would hypothesize that, because people involved in or influenced by status heterogamy tend to avoid the non-institutionalized conflict caused by status heterogamy, society suppresses and marginalizes it. Under the assumption that society's response to status heterogamy has consequences on some behavior and attitudes of the heterogamous couples, statistical findings from GSS data, with certain reservation, support this hypothesis. The findings show that status heterogamy undermines the heterogamous couples' social participation, their trust in other people, their confidence in political and economic institutions, and their satisfaction with friends and with community, but promotes their liberal political attitude. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns of interracial and interethnic marriage are well documented, but we know less about parallel processes within cohabiting unions and how these patterns have changed over time. To the extent that patterns of homogamy differ between marital and cohabiting unions, such differences could help elucidate the social boundaries of race and ethnicity, as well as the meaning of cohabitation. We document trends in racial and ethnic homogamy within cohabitation and in comparison to trends for marital homogamy. To do so, we utilize 20 years of data from the March supplements to the Current Population Study and identify cohabiting unions with Casper and Cohen's (2000) Adjusted-POSSLQ. Descriptive statistics demonstrate that the cohabiting unions are less homogamous than marital unions, but that the trends in homogamy for marital and cohabiting unions shift in parallel. We find important differences in racial homogamy across racial/ethnic groups and across family type. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]