|
|
Immigration and Intercultural Marriages: Trends and Determinants in Québec, 1880-1940
| The ultimate and most intimate form of cross-cultural relation is intermarriage. Theories proposed to account for intermarriage give a major role to three social forces we might call opportunities, preferences, and third-party influences. The constraints of the marriage market in which individuals are searching for a spouse and hence opportunities to marry co-ethnics are shaped by structural and demographic forces such as size of group, sex balance, residential segregation, diversity of economic status within the group, and continued immigration. The preferences of individuals for certain characteristics in a spouse often include socio-economic or cultural resources. Third parties such as family, institutional religion, class and the state may intervene in the selection process. Our goal in this paper is to shed light on the determinants of intermarriage in the Province of Quebec (and regions) and how these changed from 1880 to 1940 as new waves of immigrants (Irish, Scottish and English during the 19th century, a more diversified group from around the turn of the 20th century) came in contact with French Canadians. Our work will make use of the entire manuscript census of 1881 and samples for 1901 through 1941, only newly available for 1911 onwards. Canadian censuses contain very useful information for such a study: the individual’s religion, place of birth, ethnic origin, year of immigration, language spoken and ability to speak English and French, as well as other socio-economic characteristics such as schooling, occupation, and earnings which can be combined at the family, household, neighbourhood or region in multi-level models.
|
|
