Singlehood in contemporary Japan: Rating, dating, and waiting for a good match.

Background: Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate.

Objective: We analyze two unique data sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles.

Gender egalitarianism, perceived economic insecurity, and fertility intentions in Spain: A qualitative analysis.

Economic uncertainty contributes to low fertility in many European countries. On the other hand, greater gender equality may positively influence fertility. This paper examines how these two forces interact in Spain.

Microclass mobility: social reproduction in four countries.

In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms: a categorical form that has parents passing on a big-class position to their children or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing. These approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring opportunities from one generation to the next. In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big-class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.