Opposites Attract: Assortative Mating and Immigrant-Native Intermarriage in Contemporary Sweden

Is it Better to Intermarry? Immigration Background of Married Couples and Suicide Risk Among Native-Born and Migrant Persons in Sweden

Marriage is protective against suicide across most populations, including for persons of different ethnicities and immigrant backgrounds. However, the well-being benefits of marriage are contingent upon marital characteristics-such as conflict and quality-that may vary across spousal dyads with different immigration backgrounds. Leveraging Swedish register data, we compare suicide mortality among married persons on the basis of their and their spouse's immigration backgrounds. We find that relative to those in a native Swede-Swede union, Swedish men married to female immigrants and immigrant women married to native men are at higher risk of death by suicide, while immigrants of both genders who are married to someone from their birth country have a lower risk of suicide mortality. The findings support hypotheses about the strains that may be encountered by those who intermarry, as well as the potential selection of individuals into inter- and intra-ethnic marriages.

Fading family lines- women and men without children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in 19th, 20th and 21st Century Northern Sweden

We studied to what extent family lines die out over the course of 122 years based on Swedish population-level data. Our data included demographic and socioeconomic information for four generations in the Skellefteå region of northern Sweden from 1885 to 2007. The first generation in our sample consisted of men and women born between 1885 and 1899 (N = 5850), and we observed their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. We found that 48% of the first generation did not have any living descendants (great-grandchildren) by 2007. The risk of a family line dying out within the four-generational framework was highest among those who had relatively low fertility in the first generation. Mortality during reproductive years was also a leading reason why individuals in the first generation ended up with a greater risk of not leaving descendants. We identified socioeconomic differences: both the highest-status and the lowest-status occupational groups saw an increased risk of not leaving any descendants. Almost all lineages that made it to the third generation also made it to the fourth generation.