Social Network Blog - g3

Won’t you be my neighbor?

The readings for this week had an overall theme of communities affect on network size, strength, and the resources individuals can gain from these various types. The first reading by Elizabeth Bott focused on the 1950’s lifestyles of closed, tight-knit communities( segregated conjugal role-relationships) that pushed standard societal role divisions within households against the rather progressive equal division of roles and having a more dispersed but looser based network in joint conjugal role-relationship . Does the type of role relationship drive individuals to enter into environments that are more or less connected as a network? Or do the environments predetermine how connected people are and thus what role relationship they will follow? Tied into these environments, how will be value the worth of neighbors when we have limited access to other types of friends, who may have varying sorts of interest?

The second reading focuses by Wellman and Wortley focuses on what kinds of resources/ support different types of relationships ties. They mention that there are 5 types of supportive resources can be provided: emotional, small services, large services, financial aid, and companionship. The main types of ties that can offer these resources are: tie strength, access/content (neighbors), structural/group process, kinship, network membership characteristics/positional resource, and similarities and dissimilarities between network members. Within this article, it is found that strong ties and certain types of kin offer the greatest number of these supportive resources. While, on a whole, neighbors offer only convenient services, and because of their level of intimacy and amount people are willing to confide in, they can be considered not much more than weak ties based on proximity, and should be utilized for that manner unless further common characteristics are involved, and the ties can be strengthened. Otherwise, the best people to look to for resources would be kin and other strong ties. (Unless, of course you are of a small network without many options, like the 1950s segregated conjugal role-relationships. Then because of your limited options, you may find tie strength in neighbors.) (To look further into these first two readings and how they specifically relate to the topics discussed in these paragraphs look at explanations and discussion questions below the line break).

The third readings (Fischer) focus on the effects of urbanism on networks. While many people argue that city life is the bane of communities -“urban life, in sum is socially, mentally, and morally unhealthy” (9) because “the complexity of cities weakens social ties” (10)- many examples from Fischer’s book, and specifically the chapters we read), state that urbanism has a distinct effect on the personal networks of individuals. Individuals and institutions within cities go to various different sources to fulfill their needs. Some people look at nonoverlapping roles and networks as a negative result of urbanism. But Fischer states that having these vast options to satisfy tastes contributes to positive psychological health (12). People who responded that they had “nonkin” relationships with their neighbors were people who did not really have many other options to seek extraneighborhood ties if they were based in a small town situation. But in the scenarios where city-folk were mentioning neighbors as friends, there appear to be closer ties with these individuals, because the relationships are based more on compatibility than simply convenience. (Which ends up being a fortunate scenario, having a vast city of options for friends, and within proximity you luckily find someone with similar interests). Q1 However, doesn’t neighborhood selection have an effect on interest compatibility in many cases where people have an overall option of where to live? Assuming an individual chooses a neighborhood based on what the stereotype is for the area, that individual is increasing the probability of finding a compatible neighbor. I.e. For the most part, a surfer would find more compatible neighbors if he moved into a flat in Bondi than in Redfern. Q2 In regards to the immigration into the States, hoards of individuals with barely or no connections settled into distinct cultural areas or ghettos because they had common backgrounds and ties with the majority in these neighborhoods. What factors do we currently consider when we need to move to a new area/neighborhood (both college and non-college scenarios)?

Kalmijn studied the network size and types of individuals through their course of life dating, marriage, and child rearing. The overall focus of this study is to see how dyadic withdrawal – how marriage causes smaller and overlapping social networks- affects the network size of these individuals focused on. Interestingly, the Bott study is mentioned to state that the 1950s were associated with these dyadic withdrawal types of networks because of the nuclear family, when in fact, these families were only a portion of the study. There is still the whole other portion of the family that are attracted to individualism, and not just “in more recent times”. The results found that as people started dating and living together, there was the greatest drop in numbers of contacts and decent drop in number of friends. But this drop could be explain by the percentages of shared friends and joint contacts (which overall increase over time). Q1 How might the numbers of friends and contacts look when comparing friends who are in different levels of datinghood? Are the married couples spending less time with dating/single friends? Within these changes in contacts, women have more frequent contacts with friends than men and share less friends with their spouse than men. Thus, women are less socially dependent on marriage than men. While this study has less of a focus on neighborhood than the past articles, it certainly is an interesting contrast to the Bott study, where women had to drop their friends from childhood to the level of “girl friends” because they were not as compatible to their married life. It appears women now keep in contact with these friends more and have returned them to the level of friends. Q2 What societal factors contributed to this change? Can it be attributed to urbanism? joint conjugal role-relationship?

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The study by Bott focused on the roles of men and women within their family settings and the type of social networks these various families have. Bott focused on twenty families who the researchers sought out and requested the families partake in this study. There appeared to be an overarching distinction between these families based on the roles held by the husband and the wife within their familial units. There were the segregated conjugal role-relationships and the joint conjugal role-relationship .Q1. In choosing these families, there was a condition set that the families must have small children. How does the factor of having children alter familial networks? Do children cause new networks to form (i.e. parents meeting through children’s friendships and then creating their own networks? Or do parents force the children’s networks to exist (i.e. restrictions because of community size)? How might networks exist in childless families (i.e. working families)? Or families on the verge of rearing children?
In the more segregated conjugal role-relationship, the husband and the wife had very distinct roles they held which separated their familial responsibilities (i.e. the husband was in charge of the financial matters of the family, while the wife handled the housework and childrearing responsibilities). The members of this type of family rarely swapped roles/responsibilities with their spouses, and any lag in their role was picked up by colleagues (male) or relatives (female). This type of division of labor was simple, “services can be fulfilled by…the family”. It was also found that the individuals of this type of family had more highly concentrated/connected networks, but were also to be quite differentiated based on individual. For example, the husband had his work buddies, who may also serve as his pub buddies and football buddies, and these may have been friends from childhood as well. The wife on the other hand would also have this overlapping of social roles within her network. She would spend time with her neighbors, relatives, and “friends”. In most of these types of cases, these were each one the same, where a relative would also be the same role as a neighbor. Also when a wife was unable to contribute to her role, because of illness, a relative would help. In the latter part of Bott’s study, she explained why more segregated relationship roles were often found to have more highly connected networks. But because of limited regions and options, families that had these highly segregated relationship roles were almost forced to have highly connected networks, “they knew a very considerable number of local people, and many of the people they knew were acquainted with one another. In other words, their social network was highly connected…[with] considerable overlap of social roles” (355). Although these networks were highly connected there was also an interesting factor that the women and the men did not share activities so there were two distinct networks: the tight network of the men and the tight network of the women. But because of the close-knit nature of these communities, both networks were connected.
On the other hand, there were the familial networks that were joint conjugal role-relationships . In these families, the roles were divided rather evenly. Men aided in the household responsibilities, while the women also partook in the financial responsibilities. Compared to the segregated conjugal role-relationships, women were found in the workforce more often, or desired to be a part of the workforce. To suit this even split of responsibilities, it was also found that there were external individuals that were hired to help, used “institutional” aid. Often a maid or babysitter helped with the household or childrearing roles when the duties could not be filled because of illness, vacation, or simply overwork. The friends this type of family connect with are more connected with their interests and not based solely on location. Whereas, the former familial type mixed neighbors with friends with relatives, because these each often served the same role, this type of family is less concerned with making ties with their neighbors. They seek friendship based more on common interests. As a result, friendships were much more specialized (i.e. golf buddies were separate from work buddies). Also, the husband and wife were found to share friends. This type of family was found to have more diverse social networks, but was also as a result less connected than the segregated conjugal role-relationships. “The degree of segregation in the role-relationship of husband and wife varies directly with the connectedness of the families social network” (5). Thus, it was found that the more segregated a family was the more connected the social networks these families were tied to were. But, families did not solely fall into these extremes. There were intermediate families that fell into both of these extremes, and transitional, which had factors that prevented them from falling into one of these two extremes (i.e. an impending move that may cut ties and de-socialization after highly connected ties were severed after a move and the families are searching for new networks).
Bott went into reasons why these networks varied in the ways they did on the basis of the environments that surround the networks, such as: 1. Economic ties among the members of a network (in terms of kinship ties because of commonly shared jobs and SES areas), 2. Neighborhoods (families were “localized” and thus more tight-knit and people did not venture to far past their current relationships to establish new ones – i.e. neighbor becomes a spouse) Q2 Because these highly connected networks stick within these tight-knit communities, would this explain the existence of “transitional” families? , 3. Opportunities (without the opportunity to seek out people of common interests, people tend to get stuck with being friends with only people in their network) Q3 Would this explain the phenomenon found in McPherson’s study, in which people who had higher levels of education were less isolated, since they had the opportunity to meet more individuals who might share a common interest? Could there also be a correlation between this 1950s era and the limited amount of education for woman, and why these women were found to one be friends with relatives? 4. Physical and social mobility (when people are able to physically move outside of these communities and have more of a large-scale access of the world, they are able to disperse their networks more), and 5.Individual decision and choice – families may choose to enter an environment that requires them to be more highly connected or dispersed (move to a suburb or a city). Bott claims that these environmental factors determine how connected a family’s network will be. This study also finds that the social network connectedness of a family is correlated with the degree of role segregation. Q4 Then does the environment determine the degree of segregation? And based on environmental factor #5 – individual decision and choice, can a family switch to become more or less role segregated if they change their environment?

The study “Different Strokes from Different Folks” focused on the varying ties of 29 individuals. These ties connected individuals to 344 people in their networks. Wellman and Wortley separated different types of ties based on: tie strength, access/content, structural/group process, kinship, network membership characteristics/positional resource, and similarities and dissimilarities between network members. These ties were then categorized on the types of support (resources) individuals provided to the people they were tied to: emotional, small services, large services, financial aid, and companionship. Q1 In the readings of the past weeks, job networking was mentioned as positive aspect of weak ties, but it is not specified in this reading as a resource. Which type of support would you consider it to fall under?
The category of tie strength has been a major factor of our past readings. McPherson states that strong ties “contact those whom they have close core networks with [and] those that have many types of relationships”. Because of the many contacts and the connect of a strong tie with many types of relationships (network and role overlap), it is not a surprise to me that strong ties gave respondents the “most of their social support – of all kinds”. It would appear that for individuals to fulfill all of their needs they should look to strong ties. But, there was a valid point brought up that people “avoid burdening network members with requests for support for fear of overstressing ties” (567). So although one can feel as though a strong tie is the best place to look for resources, one should seek other tie options to avoid overburdening, which would explain the finding for different types of ties.
Contact/access exposes individuals’ awareness of individuals in their surroundings. Frequent exposure to neighbors gives individuals a sense existing problems and shared feelings (i.e. loneliness). Also, having close contact allows for easy access of aid. With these factors involved, neighbors were found in this study to provide mostly small services because of the easy of delivery. However, proximity does not equate to immediate friendship, because of a lack of emotional bonds and shared interests. Thus, resources are limited to only easy of delivery.

Wellman and Wortley also focused on the kinship ties and how they varied extensively based on how close of a relative is to an individual and the resources he/she will provide. As Professor Hampton commented in class, you are most likely to ask a financial favor ($2,000) from your parent, because they are, of all types of ties, to give you the aid. Based on the other support that the parent-child tie provides, I believe that this is the strongest because it fulfills most of the requirements of strong ties set by Granovetter: “the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services” (1361). Thus, the parent/child tie can understandably give the proper resources set out above in the category of tie strength. As the distance of kin increases, the resources offered/requested by the subjects decreases, because I believe kinship is a major determiner of tie strength. One resource that appears to be utilized in this tie is of companionship, respondents to this study state that they seek this resource more from friends (70%) as opposed to immediate kin (48%). Q2 However, how might a female from a segregated conjugal role-relationship, discussed in Bott’s study best choose her resources when the network connectivity has overlapping roles of kin and neighbors?