Cultural Continuity or Divergence? A Relational Framework for Exploring Parent-Child Cultural Similarity in Immigrant Societies

Abstract

How can researchers use dyadic surveys to quantify the extent to which an individual’s belief patterns map onto the cultural dispositions of their parents? I propose a multistage relational framework for addressing this question. Specifically, I show how simple, distance-based procedures commonly used in machine learning settings can be harnessed to develop intuitive measures of parent-child cultural similarity in a multidimensional feature space bounded by a vector of theoretically relevant inputs. In developing this argument, I draw on dyadic, parent-adolescent data across four immigrant societies in Europe as well as non-parametric algorithms and regression techniques. Using these instruments, I illustrate how religious affiliation is associated with parent-child cultural similarity and assess whether cultural correspondence in adolescence predicts political orientations in early adulthood. While this study is inspired by questions of interest to migration scholars, the framework proposed herein is relevant for any analysis scrutinizing parent-child cultural correspondence.