Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study
Name
partnership_friendship_SF_preprint.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
458.38 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5634cac923f7530eb4873808c2060d01
Author(s)
Stadtfeld, Christoph
Pentland, Alex Sandy
Date Issued
2015
Journal
Social Forces
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Citation
Stadtfeld, C., and A. Pentland. "Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study." Social Forces 94 1 (2015): 453-77.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ties drive clustering in friendship networks: individuals who are in a partnership tend to have common friends and befriend other couples. Second, partnership ties influence the level of homophily in these emerging friendship clusters. Partners tend to be similar in a number of attributes (homogamy). If one partner selects friends based on preferences for homophily, then the other partner may befriend the same person regardless of whether they also have homophilic preferences. Thus, two homophilic ties emerge based on a single partner's preferences. This amplification of homophily can be observed in many attributes (e.g., ethnicity, religion, age). Gender homophily, however, may be de-amplified, as the gender of partners differs in heterosexual partnerships. In our study, we follow dynamic friendship formation among 126 individuals and their cohabiting partners in a university-related graduate housing community over a period of nine months (N = 2,250 self-reported friendship relations). We find that partnership ties strongly shape the dynamic process of friendship formation. They are a main driver of local network clustering and explain a striking amount of homophily.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/SF/SOV079
