Tag Archives | Social Networks

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This study reexamines the relationship between the coexistence of distinct ethno-cultural groups and social connectedness. Although previous research suggests a negative association between neighborhood-level ethnic diversity or ethnic minority shares and individual integration, alternative theoretical perspectives propose that integration can occur equally well in neighborhoods with distinct ethnic groups but may require more time. Moreover, the causal nature of the observed negative relationship is unclear due to potential confounding biases related to neighborhood selection. To address these issues, this study presents a framework for estimating the longitudinal effects of neighborhood ethnic composition on social ties with neighbors. The objective is to estimate the differences in neighborly contacts between individuals in low- and high-minority share neighborhoods, under a counterfactual scenario where all households stay in their neighborhood for the same period. The findings challenge previous research by showing that the ethnic composition does not impact the quality of neighborly contacts. In addition, residing in a neighborhood for five years significantly enhances social connectivity, regardless of ethnic composition. These results suggest that reduced cohesion in areas with higher minority presence may be due to other factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage and housing instability.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Stephan Dochow-Sondershaus: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: stdo@soc.ku.dk

Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Windzio, Merlin Schaeffer, Celine Teney, and Jan Goebel for their invaluable support and feedback on this article. I am also thankful to the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences for providing the necessary resources to complete this work. In addition, I appreciate the valuable feedback from participants at the 2021 Conference of the German Academy of Sociology, the 2022 German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference, and the 2024 Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association. Finally, I am grateful to Philipp Kaminsky, Christine Kurka, and Michaela Engelmann at the DIW in Berlin for providing a supportive work environment and for their uplifting spirit.

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Reproducibility Package: Stata and R code for replication is available on the author’s Open Science Framework page (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RCFN4). The datasets were made available by the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. The SOEP data can be requested after signing a data assignment contract (https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.601584.en/data_access.html). For more information, visit https://doi.org/10.5684/soep.core.v36eu. The Microm-SOEP dataset for neighborhood data is provided by and accessible to researchers at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin.

Citation: Dochow-Sondershaus, Stephan. 2024. “Hunkering Down or Catching Up? No Long-Term Effect of Ethnic Minority Share on Neighborhood Contacts.” Sociological Science 11: 965-988.
Received: April 10, 2024
Accepted: September 21, 2024
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a35

Identity from Symbolic Networks: The Rise of New Hollywood

By Parker Webservices on April 2, 2024 in Articles

Katharina Burgdorf, Henning Hillmann

Sociological Science April 2, 2024
10.15195/v11.a12

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To what extent may individual autonomy persist under the constraints of group identity? This dualism is particularly salient in new movements that value individual creativity above all, and yet have to muster community cohesion to establish a new style. Using the case of New Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, the authors show how this movement reconciled the demands of collective identity and collaboration in film production with their commitment to the individual filmmaker’s artistic autonomy. Using information from the Internet Movie Database on 17,425 filmmakers who were active between 1930 and 1999, the authors show that a cohesive symbolic network, in which New Hollywood filmmakers shared references to a canon of revered films, served as a foundation for the collective identity of this new artistic movement. References include allusions to iconic scenes, settings, and shots of classic films. In contrast, collaborations in film projects yielded a fragmented network that did little to support the creative enterprise of New Hollywood. The evidence suggests that symbolic ties through shared citations allowed New Hollywood filmmakers to realize their vision of autonomous auteur filmmaking and to draw symbolic boundaries that separated them from the old Hollywood studio system.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Katharina Burgdorf: Department of Sociology, University of Bremen
E-mail: burgdorf@uni-bremen.de

Henning Hillmann: Department of Sociology, University of Mannheim
E-mail: hillmann@uni-mannheim.de

Acknowledgements: We thank Peter Bearman, Jennifer Lena, and Christina Gathmann for their detailed comments on earlier drafts. We also wish to thank Philipp Brandt, Mark Wittek, Elias Strehle, Florian Keusch, Rachel Skaggs, Tania Aparicio, Gillian Gualtieri, Philippa Chong, Laura Garbes, Etienne Ollion and participants of the CREST seminar, Sunbelt, NetGloW, and EUSN conference for their helpful feedback during various stages of this project.

Replication Package: All raw and prepared data and the code can be accessed via https://dataverse.harvard.edu/privateurl.xhtml?token=c81114da-6e97-44bb-9272-f19b302afcb9.

Citation: Burgdorf, Katharina, and Henning Hillmann. 2024. “Identity from Symbolic Networks: The Rise of New Hollywood.” Sociological Science 11: 297-339.
Received: June 30, 2023
Accepted: October 13, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Stephen Vaisey
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a12

The Ethnic Lens: Social Networks and the Salience of Ethnicity in the School Context

By Parker Webservices on October 3, 2023 in Articles

Clemens Kroneberg, Mark Wittek

Sociological Science October 3, 2023
10.15195/v10.a22

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Research on ethnic segregation in schools regularly assumed that ethnic homophily—the tendency to befriend same-ethnic peers, above and beyond other mechanisms of tie formation—is associated with salient ethnic boundaries. We devise a more direct test of this assumption based on a novel measure of ethno-racial group perceptions. In a network study of more than 3000 students in 39 schools of a metropolitan region in Germany, we asked students to indicate which cliques they perceived in their school grade and to describe these groups in their own words. We find that ethno-racial labels are more likely directed at larger cliques that include a higher share of Muslim students or more students with stronger ethnic identification. Still, ethno-racial labels are rarely employed, both absolutely and relative to other modes of classification. Moreover, net ethnic segregation in friendships (“ethnic homophily”) and the reverse pattern in dislike relations (“ethnic heterophobia”) are not associated with a more frequent use of ethno-racial labels. Our results have substantive and methodological implications for the study of social networks and diversity in educational settings.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Clemens Kroneberg: Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne
E-mail: c.kroneberg@uni-koeln.de

Mark Wittek: Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne
E-mail: wittek@wiso.uni-koeln.de

Acknowledgements: Both authors contributed equally to this work. Earlier versions of the article were presented at the “Frontiers in Quantitative Migration Research” colloquium series at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research and the Hertie School of Governance, at the 3rd Cultural Diversity, Migration, and Education Conference, Potsdam Center for Empirical Research on Inclusive Education, and at the 3rd Conference of the Academy of Sociology “Cohesive Societies?” at the University of Leipzig. We thank the various participants for their helpful feedback and especially Philipp Jugert who provided stimulating comments on a first version of this work. We would also like to thank Rosa Flore, Anna Bahß, Madita Zöll, Senami Viktoria Hotse, Katharina Burkart, Hannah Rose Tendal, Jan Nguyen, Alexandra Bothe, Zara Mansius, Juliane Reichelt, Mira Böing, Chiara Barfuß, and Agnes Tarnowski who helped in the coding of qualitative clique descriptions.

Funding: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 716461). Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC 2126/1–390838866.

Citation: Kroneberg, Clemens, and Mark Wittek. 2023. “The Ethnic Lens: Social Networks and the Salience of Ethnicity in the School Context.” Sociological Science 10: 613-639.
Received: February 7, 2023
Accepted: March 14, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Wener Raub
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a22

Homophily, Setbacks, and the Dissolution of Heterogeneous Ties: Evidence from Professional Tennis

By Parker Webservices on March 24, 2023 in Articles

Xuege (Cathy) Lu, Shinan Wang, Letian Zhang

Sociological Science March 24, 2023
10.15195/v10.a7

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Why do people engage with similar others despite ample opportunities to interact with dissimilar others? We argue that adversity or setbacks may have a stronger deteriorative effect on ties made up of dissimilar individuals, prompting people to give up on such ties more easily, which, over the long run, results in people forming ties with similar others. We examine this argument in the context of Association of Tennis Professionals tournaments, using data on 9,669 unique doubles pairs involving 1,812 unique players from 99 countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that doubles pairs with players from different countries are more likely to dissolve after a setback, especially if those countries lack social trust and connections with one another; this reality further contributes to the individual player’s increased tendency to collaborate with same-country players in the next tournament. Our study has direct implications for interventions for diversity and inclusion.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Xuege (Cathy) Lu: Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota
E-mail: xuegelu@umn.edu

Shinan Wang: Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
E-mail: shinan.wang@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Letian Zhang: Harvard Business School
E-mail: lzhang@hbs.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank Alice (Can) Wang for excellent research assistance. Our data and replication code can be found via https://osf.io/x23ay/?view_only=9521ee27707944fa80004f0561372943.

Citation: Lu, Xuege (Cathy), Shinan Wang, and Letian Zhang. 2023. “Homophily, Setbacks, and the Dissolution of Heterogeneous Ties: Evidence from Professional Tennis.” Sociological Science 10: 227-250.
Received: September 28, 2022
Accepted: December 12, 2022
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Andreas Wimmer
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a7

Becoming an Ideologue: Social Sorting and the Microfoundations of Polarization

By Parker Webservices on August 1, 2022 in Articles

Craig M. Rawlings

Sociological Science August 1, 2022
10.15195/v9.a13

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This article elaborates and tests the hypothesis that the sociopolitical segregation of interpersonal networks (i.e., social sorting) is at the root of recent polarization trends in the United States. After reviewing recent trends, the article outlines the micro-level pathways through which social sorting along sociopolitical lines leads individuals to become more ideological in their identities and attitude structures. It then tests these pathways using panel data from the General Social Survey, which includes detailed measures of individuals’ social ties, ideological identification, and attitudes across a wide array of issues. Results show two dominant pathways through which more socially sorted individuals become more ideological: a short pathway directly linking social sorting to more extreme ideological identities, and a longer pathway linking social sorting to more extreme ideological identities through an increasingly ideological alignment of individuals’ attitude structures. The shorter pathway predominates among conservatives and the longer pathway among liberals. These micro-level pathways are shown to generalize to different macro-level polarization trends in identities and attitude structures for conservatives and liberals. Findings therefore uphold core sociological principles while providing stronger social-structural foundations for a growing body of mainly psychological research on ideological asymmetries.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Craig M. Rawlings: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: craig.rawlings@duke.edu

Acknowledgments: For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Chris Bail and Clayton Childress. I am grateful for insights provided by several members of Duke University’s Worldview Lab, including Christopher Johnston, Nicholas Restrepo Ochoa, and Steve Vaisey. For useful comments at a conceptual stage of this work, which was presented at the 2019 Network Ecology mini-conference at Stanford University, I thank Delia Baldassarri, Amir Goldberg, John Levi Martin, and Dan McFarland. Any errors or omissions are my own. Address correspondence to Craig M. Rawlings, Dept. of Sociology, Duke University, 270 Reuben-Cooke, 417 Chapel Dr., Durham, NC 27708.

Citation: Rawlings, Craig M. 2022. “Becoming an Ideologue: Social Sorting and the Microfoundations of Polarization.” Sociological Science 9: 313-345.
Received: March 13, 2022
Accepted: June 7, 2022
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v9.a13

Still a Small World? University Course Enrollment Networks before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Parker Webservices on January 21, 2021 in Articles

Kim A. Weeden, Benjamin Cornwell, Barum Park

Sociological Science January 21, 2021
10.15195/v8.a4

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In normal times, the network ties that connect students on a college campus are an asset; during a pandemic, they can become a liability. Using prepandemic data from Cornell University, Weeden and Cornwell (2020) showed how co-enrollment in classes creates a “small world” network with high clustering, short path lengths, and multiple independent pathways connecting students. Using data from the fall of 2020, we assess how the structure of the co-enrollment network changed as Cornell, like many other institutions of higher education, adapted to the pandemic by adopting a hybrid instructional model. We find that under hybrid instruction, not only is a much smaller share of students in the face-to-face network, but the paths connecting student pairs in the network lengthened, the share of student pairs connected by three or fewer degrees of separation declined, clustering increased, and a greater share of co-enrollment ties occurred between students in the same field of study. The small world became both less connected and more fragmented.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kim A. Weeden: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: kw74@cornell.edu

Benjamin Cornwell: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: btc49@cornell.edu

Barum Park: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: b.park@cornell.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to Kim A. Weeden, Department of Sociology, Cornell University; kw74@cornell.edu. We acknowledge Cornell University’s administration for generously and promptly providing access to anonymized data.

Citation: Weeden, Kim A., Benjamin Cornwell, and Barum Park. 2021. “Still a Small World? University Course Enrollment Networks before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Sociological Science 8: 73-82.
Received: November 19, 2020
Accepted: December 18, 2020
Editors: Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a4

The Toll of Turnover: Network Instability, Well-Being, and Academic Effort in 56 Middle Schools

By Parker Webservices on December 18, 2020 in Articles

Hana Shepherd, Adam Reich

Sociological Science December 18, 2020
10.15195/v7.a28

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This article examines whether network instability—namely, the extent of turnover in a person’s social network over time—is a distinct social process that affects individual well-being. Using a unique two-wave network data set collected in a field experiment that involved more than 21,100 students across 56 middle schools, we find a strong negative association between network instability and well-being and academic effort at the individual level, independent of other types of network change effects. We assess whether the negative effect of network instability remains when the source of instability is exogenous, the result of participation in the randomized intervention. Network instability leads to negative consequences even in this context, negatively impacting students who directly participated in the intervention. For nonintervention students in treatment schools, the intervention stabilized their social networks. We discuss the implications of these findings for studies of social networks and collective action.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Hana Shepherd: Department of Sociology, Rutgers University
E-mail: hshepherd@sociology.rutgers.edu

Adam Reich: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: ar3237@columbia.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank the members of the Columbia University Networks and Time Workshop for their feedback on this project. Amy Kate Bailey, Lauren Krivo, Emily Marshall, Christine Percheski, and LaTonya Trotter provided helpful feedback on early versions of the manuscript. The data set used in this article (available at Inter-University Consortium for Politics and Social Research, https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37070.v1) was collected by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd and was funded by grants from the W. T. Grant Foundation Scholars Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Princeton Educational Research Section, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rutgers Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Citation: Shepherd, Hana, and Adam Reich. 2020. “The Toll of Turnover: Network Instability, Well-Being, and Academic Effort in 56 Middle Schools.” Sociological Science 7: 663-691.
Received: August 12, 2020
Accepted: September 30, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a28

The Structure of Negative Social Ties in Rural Village Networks

By Parker Webservices on March 6, 2019 in Articles

Alexander Isakov, James H. Fowler, Edoardo M. Airoldi, Nicholas A. Christakis

Sociological Science, March 6, 2019
10.15195/v6.a8

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Negative (antagonistic) connections have been of longstanding theoretical importance for social structure. In a population of 24,696 adults interacting face to face within 176 isolated villages in western Honduras, we measured all connections that were present, amounting to 105,175 positive and 16,448 negative ties. Here, we show that negative and positive ties exhibit many of the same structural characteristics. We then develop a complete taxonomy of all 138 possible triads of two-type relationships. Consistent with balance theory, we find that antagonists of friends and friends of antagonists tend to be antagonists; but, in an important empirical refutation of balance theory, we find that antagonists of antagonists also tend to be antagonists, not friends. Finally, villages with comparable levels of animosity tend to be geographically proximate. Similar processes, involving social contact, give rise to both positive and negative social ties in rural villages, and negative ties play an important role in social structure.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Alexander Isakov: Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University; Department of Sociology, Yale University
E-mail: alexander.isakov.11@gmail.com

James H. Fowler: Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego; Political Science Department, University of California, San Diego
E-mail: fowler@ucsd.edu

Edoardo M. Airoldi: Department of Statistical Science, Fox School of Business, Temple University; Department of Statistics and Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
E-mail: airoldi@fas.harvard.edu

Nicholas A. Christakis: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University; Department of Statistics and Data Science, Yale University
E-mail: nicholas.christakis@yale.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Emily Erikson, Dan Gilbert, David Rand, Yongren Shi, Hiro Shirado, Maggie Traeger, Tom Snijders, Gijs Huitsing, and Arnav Tripathy for their helpful comments. We are also grateful to the data collection and software teams for the Honduras project, including Rennie Negron, Liza Nicoll, and Mark McKnight. This research was supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Tata Group, the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant P30-AG034420), the National Science Foundation (grant IIS-1409177), and the Office of Naval Research (grants N00014-17-1-2131). The authors declare no competing interests.

Citation: Isakov, Alexander, James H. Fowler, Edoardo M. Airoldi, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2019. “The Structure of Negative Social Ties in Rural Village Networks.” Sociological Science 6: 197-218.
Received: January 16, 2019
Accepted: February 10, 2019
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a8

The Social Life of Mortgage Delinquency and Default

By Parker Webservices on July 26, 2018 in Articles

Brian J. McCabe

Sociological Science, July 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a21

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Although falling behind on a mortgage loan has significant personal consequences, we know little about whether the experience of delinquency or default influences the housing market behavior of other people in the defaulter’s social networks. In this article, I ask how exposure to mortgage default through social networks affects perceptions of the housing market, judgments about the strategic default behavior of other households, and expectations for homeownership. Although individuals purposively draw on information from their social networks to aid in their housing search, theories of social influence have yet to be applied to the negative experience of mortgage delinquency or default. Drawing on the National Housing Survey, I find that individuals exposed to mortgage strain through their social networks express more negative expectations for the housing market and hold more permissive attitudes about strategic default. Homeowners reporting network exposure to mortgage strain are more likely to prefer rental housing when they next move. These results are strongest when individuals are connected to someone who has fallen behind on a mortgage payment in the previous three months.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brian J. McCabe: Department of Sociology, Georgetown University
E-mail: mccabeb@georgetown.edu

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Citation: McCabe, Brian J. 2018. “The Social Life of Mortgage Delinquency and Default.” Sociological Science 5: 489-512.
Received: April 18, 2018
Accepted: May 26, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a21

At the Expense of Quality

By Parker Webservices on June 28, 2018 in Articles

Brittany M. Bond, Tatiana Labuzova, Roberto M. Fernandez

Sociological Science, June 28, 2018
10.15195/v5.a17

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Many organizations use employee referral programs to incentivize employees to refer potential applicants from their social networks. Employers frequently offer a monetary bonus to employees who refer an applicant, and this is often contingent on whether the person is then hired and retained for a given length of time. In deciding whether to refer someone, referrers face a potential role conflict, as they need to balance their motivations for helping connections find job opportunities with concerns regarding their reputations with their employers. To the extent that monetary incentives shift an employee’s considerations away from finding the best matches for the employer, referral bonuses may increase the chances that lower-quality candidates are referred. Using a survey vignette experiment, we find that even a small referral bonus increases the likelihood that referrers will refer lower-quality candidates, and they are more likely to refer people they do not know well. We further discuss theoretical and practical implications regarding the efficiency of incentivized referral programs in producing quality applicant pools for employers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brittany M. Bond: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E-mail: bbond@mit.edu

Tatiana Labuzova: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E-mail: labuzova@mit.edu

Roberto M. Fernandez: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E-mail: robertof@mit.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank our colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and elsewhere for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. We have also benefitted from help, advice, and feedback from Matthew Amengual, Rhett Andrew Brymer, Santiago Campero, John Carroll, Emilio Castilla, Minjae Kim, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, Heather Yang, and participants in the Economic Sociology Working Group at MIT Sloan and the Ninth Annual Meeting of the People and Organizations Conference at The Wharton School.