A general assortative mating factor?: An idea in need of a dataset
I was talking with my girlfriend about how on some areas we don't match, and on others we match well, and then it occurred to me that there may be a general assortative mating factor. I.e. if one takes a lot of variables: personality, intelligence, socioeconomic, interests, then calculates the partner correlations, then one could maybe extract a somewhat general factor of many of these. The method is correlate the partner trait correlations with each other for each trait. I.e., are couples who are more similar in intelligence, also more similar in socioeconomic variables? Likely. Are they also more similar in interests? Maybe slightly? Are people who are more similar in height more similar in intelligence? Seems doubtful since the intelligence x height cor is only .2 or so. But maybe.
What is needed is a dataset with, say, >100 couples and >10 diverse variables of interest. Anyone know of such a dataset?