Robert D. Mare

Robert Denis Mare (1951 – February 1, 2021) was an American sociologist and demographer best known for research on social stratification. He received numerous awards and had his research covered in the popular press. Mare served as the President of the Population Association of America (PAA) in 2010 and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Early life and education

Robert Mare was born in North Vancouver, Canada, in 1951, to Arthur and Helen Mare.

Mare collaborated with Christopher Winship from the 1980s through the early 1990s, where they produced articles revolving around the topics of statistical modeling, education attainment and unemployment.

Youth unemployment and school-to-work transition Mare worked with Winship on issues related to youth unemployment and the transition from school to workplace. Their work revealed the importance of selection bias and population compositional changes in understanding employment trends. Mare argued that changes in employment rates among youth were not just due to individual action but also due to compositional changes in the labor force. They also applied this framework to explain the rise of black youth in the 1970s and 1980s, attributing it to increased school enrollment and military enlistment among black youth. Their works focused on how changes in school enrollment or military enlistment affected employment rates across different demographic groups, pinpointing to the interplay between individual actions and macro-level societal trends. His research on marriage received coverage in such media outlets as The Atlantic and The New York Times. Mare is perhaps best known for the "Mare Model," according to which a person's educational trajectory is understood as the product of a sequence of decisions made at successive stages.

Mare expanded on a cumulative model that operationalized educational attainment and implemented unemployment as a critical contingency, brought family formation and demographic processes into the study of mobility, and advanced sociology research beyond the scope of kinship influence of parents to multiple generations. A large aspect of his study depended on the historical context of how education had changed from 1907 to 1957 among his later cohorts, especially (minority) students and military veterans.

By 1918, all the U.S. states had enacted legislation that required all children to obtain mandatory education until a certain age, which began the era of universal education within the United States. In particular, this early model showed a positive relationship between the father's education and job status with the child's own education and first job. Therefore, this model was vital in determining the impact of family on education and career prospects. This research was a major foundation of the Mare model. When Mare started his research, many sociologists were investigating unemployment in the population, especially among 16-18 year olds and among the African American population, due to significant government grants. However, there was a shift in focus to the transition between education and work and military and civil life. For example, these researchers emphasized how obtaining a Ph.D. would impact their ability to obtain a job compared with someone with a master's or bachelor's degree. This led to many researchers starting to use statistical and computer models to represent the impact and cause of educational attainment with various factors, from social standing to parental support, and employment prospects.

Principles of the Mare Model The foundation of the Mare model emphasized the role of progression from one education level to another, and how progression is impacted by a number of social factors. In particular, his research uncovered that a family with higher-valued forms of occupation, income, and the final education level of the parents tended to increase the chance of a child ending their education at an earlier stage. This conceptual shift provides a detailed processing analysis of data for each specific educational stage to understand the impact of socioeconomic background on educational achievement.

Neighborhood choice and the dynamics of residential segregation

Future opportunities for children Mare conducted extensive research on the relationships between neighborhood conditions, race, and social mobility. This included various disciplines, including a focus on how children's future opportunities are shaped by the economic characteristics of their neighborhoods. This includes how moving residences influence exposure to advantages or disadvantages. Mare researched using data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS) and the Child Development Supplement (CDS) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), demonstrating the significance of residential mobility in shaping children's experiences with neighborhood poverty. Mare additionally found that mobility is not randomly distributed, and patterns of relocation influence whether children move to areas with greater or lesser economic resources. For example, Black children in the Western United States experience a wider range of economic environments when they move. Using the survey data from Detroit, Mare identified shifts in attitudes toward neighborhood racial composition, which influenced mobility trends. For example, black households may relocate from neighborhoods undergoing demographic changes, often moving to suburban or middle-class areas.

Mare's work on mixed-income neighborhoods provided a nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in fulfilling and maintaining economic integration in urban residential studies. The findings revealed policy implications addressing the underlying factors that influence residential mobility. Mare, along with Elizabeth Brucht, empirically examined Thomas Schelling's tipping model, which explains how even mild preferences for living among one's own racial group can lead to substantial segregation.

The article on residential segregation and associative mating is a particular validation of Mare's broader ambitions with these Swedish data. Mare's work looked at the trends in these sorts of relationships over time.

Historical trends Mare tracked three distinct periods in this tendency for assortative mating. This article became a blockbuster at that time. His claim that rises in educational homogamy may widen the inequality gap among families in the socioeconomic achievement of their offspring has sparked subsequent research in this domain.

By 1990, Mare deemed demography more seriously in the study of mobility. He engaged in studying the socioeconomic composition of families, marriage and partnering, as well as the education of offspring, in response to the Blau-Duncan model. Together with Maralani, they proposed a multigenerational model that incorporates demographic explanatory variables including family background, marriage, fertility, and mortality in social mobility. Their research generated detailed processing of gender and multigenerational data to analyze the effects of assortative mating on lower fertility rates among high-status families.

Multigenerational process Mare disentangled the parents-child dyads to build a more comprehensive model for the demographic and stratification patterns of the United States for roughly a half century. They found that the arrangement of a more assortative marriage pattern, the lower fertility rate in the high-status couples, and the relative enhanced survival among lower-status offspring resulted in less inequality in the long run compared with a single generation's short-term turnover.

Methodological innovation Song and Mare developed the crossover between the prospective and retrospective views of mobility and proposed a correction that eliminates 95% of the bias in retrospective data. His integration with prospective and retrospective data effectively increases the accuracy of measurement in studies of intergenerational social mobility.

Awards and positions

Guggenheim Fellowship: Received in 1994 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for lifetime achievement from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1999. James S. Coleman Best Article Award: Granted by the American Sociological Association's Section on Rationality and Society for 2005–2007, shared with Elizabeth Bruch. Robert Park Best Article Award: Conferred by the American Sociological Association's Section on Community and Urban Sociology in 2006, shared with Elizabeth Bruch. President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 28 on Social Stratification and Mobility: Served as president in 2006. Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, both in 2010.