The use of inter-marriage statistics as an index of assimilation

Summary

Marriage statistics have for many years been used as a means of assessing the speed with which immigrant, racial or ethnico-religious groups shed their ethnic identity and become assimilated. This paper reviews the problems involved in using marriage statistics for this purpose (making special reference to immigrant groups) and concludes that though inter-marriage is a reasonable measure of assimilation, the ratios in common use greatly overstate or distort the extent of inter-marriage. The paper then puts forward two much more reliable ratios— one measuring the tendency to inter-marry on the part of those having some opportunity to inter-marry, and the other measuring the actual extent of intermarriage in the ethnic group as a whole—and suggests that the best assessment comes from using these two in conjunction. Though these ratios are readily obtainable from field and documentary surveys they cannot be derived from official published statistics; the paper therefore puts forward another ratio which is obtainable from official statistics but is more reliable than the ratios in common use.