1 Occupational marriage networks in the USA, 1970-2010 Dave Griffiths and Paul Lambert, School of Applied Social Science, University of Stirling This paper explores occupational stratification through analysis of the social networks of occupational incumbents. Data is taken from the US Current Population Survey from 1970 to 2010 to explore marriage patterns by occupational position. The paper supports Treiman’s (1977) hypothesis that the relative advantage and prestige of occupations remains consistent over time. Through adopting a social network perspective, it is possible to identify changes which are occurring within the occupational structure, particularly regarding educational expansion, and understand how structures remain resilient despite socio-cultural changes. The categorisation of occupations into social classes is also explored, with a case study demonstrating that the aggregation of management roles can produce suboptimal categories. The study of social interaction patterns to assess relative levels of occupational advantage has been utilised in two, somewhat separate, sociological movements in recent times. Firstly, social interaction distance (SID) analysis has produced scales of the relative advantage of occupations through analysing patterns of friendship or marriage to ascertain which types of workers frequently interact. Secondly, position generator tools have increasingly been used to assess the social capital of individuals by exploring the resources available through social networks. In this paper, we bring together the SID tradition of exploring occupational stratification with social network methods to analyse the underlying patterns of vocational connections. We argue that a network approach provides a robust method which can identify nuances in the occupational structure which can aid our understanding of occupational stratification. Occupational structure Social Interaction Distance (SID) methods for constructing scales of occupational advantage have a long sociological tradition (Laumann and Guttman 1966; Blau and Duncan 1967; MacDonald 1972; Stewart et al. 1973). The rationale behind their construction is that it is possible to assess the relative advantage of occupations by analysing the vocations of the people they interact with. Social interaction patterns are assumed to reflect forces of homogamy and homophily which are linked to social inequalities, and therefore maps of the social interaction distance structure can serve to identify occupational structures of stratification and inequality.