Comments on Conceptualizing and Measuring the Exchange of Beauty and Status. (October 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gullickson, Aaron
• Is Part Of: American sociological review. Volume 82:Number 5(2017:Oct.)
• Page Start: 1093
• Page End: 1099
• Publication Date: 2017-10
• Subjects: marriage -- demography -- gender -- status exchange -- model interpretation; Sociology -- Periodicals; Social history -- Periodicals; 301
• DOI: 10.1177/0003122417724001
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0003-1224

Abstract

In this comment, I identify two methodological issues in McClintock's (2014) article on beauty exchange. First, McClintock's difference models, which find no evidence of exchange, are poor measures of exchange that fail to account for important confounders and rely on an overly narrow conceptualization of exchange. Second, McClintock codes her log-linear models to find a difference in the effect of men's and women's beauty in exchange rather than the total effect of women's beauty, which is both statistically significant and substantively large.