Social Network Blog - r10

Bott’s paper attempts to identify a relationship between a married couple’s division of responsibility (i.e. household chores, work and financial matters, child care duties) and its external social network (i.e. friends, family, neighbors). Bott determines that couples who clearly divide their responsibilities into distinct male duties and distinct female duties tend to have more interconnected external social networks. On the other hand, couples who share duties and have joint (overlapping) role-relationships tended to have a more dispersed social network. Bott admits there are multiple intermediary degrees within this dichotomy.

Bott’s work developed from a study she did of twenty London families. The study involved extensive observations and interviews. However, I thought that her study lacks verisimilitude. Specifically, couples who socialize in separate circles (both at work/home and within the neighborhood) would appear to have a less highly integrated network. On the other hand, it would appear that couples who share responsibilities and who have a shared social network of friends would tend to have more highly integrated networks. However, I missed a critical point of distinction.

Bott’s question is about the connectedness of these individuals’ networks, not the overlap of the husband and wife’s networks. Take the example of the N family, with a “segregated conjugal role-relationship associated with a highly connected network” (p.353). Mr. N could be friends with A, B, and C while Mrs. N could be friends with D, E, and F. However, Bott found that couples who had such distinct relationships tended to have friends who lived close to them. Thus, A, B, C, D, E, and F were all neighbors, who had a high likelihood of knowing one another (and thus being a highly integrated network).

Take the hypothetical S family (developed by me to represent the 2nd type of family discussed in Bott’s article). Mr. S and Mrs. S had friends G, H, I, J, K, and L. G lived in the north of Britain; H in the south, I in the west, J in the east, K in the northeast, and L in the southwest. Mr. and Mrs. S, in order to visit these friends, needed to work together to travel and socialize together. The relationship between Mr. S and Mrs. S is more balanced and equitable. However, their network is quite dispersed, geographically (and most likely socially).

These two examples explain why a “closer couple” (as I imagined it) would have a more dispersed network while a couple in a more “cold, separatist” relationship could have a more integrated network. I then wonder and ask: What is the direction of causality in Bott’s hypothesis. Specifically, do the dynamics of the marital relationship affect the style of the social network, or does the dispersion/integration of the social network determine the dynamics of the couple’s relationship?

Fischer attempts to address the impact of urbanism on community ties. He looks at urbanites’ relationships with kin and non-kin neighbors, co-workers, fellow organization members, and “just friends” (an “other” category of voluntary associations). Just like Bott sees one’s network as reflective of one’s personal/private values and behaviors, Fischer says that “We each build a network – which is one part of building a life” (p.4). He then goes on to see if the structure of city life affects how individuals build this aspect of their lives.

Fischer points out that urbanites have a larger pool of people from whom they can choose relationships. He also mentions that traditionally, people have looked to family in times of struggle and that “living in especially urban communities apparently reduced involvement with kin” (p.81). Thus, I ask: Does an individual having an emergency situation in a city have a smaller chance of being helped? I answer this question by remembering Latane and Darley’s 1970 theory of bystander intervention and the diffusion of responsibility. Applying this theory, one would determine that people in a city would not come to the distressed individual’s rescue. However, is this inattentiveness because city neighbors are not kin or because the city is distracting and forces people to retreat into more isolated spheres? In addition, as Fischer asks, would unexercised kin ties be there in times of social trauma?

Fischer then explains how “[i]n the modern city, neighbors are just vaguely familiar strangers” (p.98). Thus, these non-kin are not replacing the intimate role kin traditionally played. He then says how “urbanism adds social ties outside the neighborhood” (p.101), discussing how the source of one’s network may be more likely to be co-workers or members of organizations (although, other theories indicate that people are no longer joining voluntary organizations as often). Thus, after reading this article, I was perplexed, wondering who does Fischer believe forms a city dweller’s social network, and for what can the city dweller depend on this network?

Also, does the environment of a city attract a certain type of people, or does the environment shape the individual and his or her social networks?

Wellman seems to be responding to Granovetter in his journal article. Whereas I criticized Granovetter for poorly operationalizing ‘strong ties,’ I think Wellman captures the diversity of measuring tie strength quite perceptively. Specifically, he narrows his study to focus on level of support and identifies six key variables (strength, contact, interaction in group milieus, kinship, personal characteristics, similarities and dissimilarities) to predict level of support. He agrees with Granovetter in that “the more contact between network members, the more supportive the relationship” (p.568).

But yet his argument goes further. For example, he recognizes that kinship cannot necessarily be measured by contact; thus he isolates it as a separate variable. Wellman admits “Yet not all kinfolk have active ties. Do kinship relations depend on intimacy to be supportive, or does the supportiveness of kin operate independently of tie strength of other relational factors?” (p.572). Whereas Granovetter measured strong ties by contact, Wellman puts forth the idea of other variables here. He later says that parent-child ties broadly affects support.

I ask: Wellman says “Only in part do these networks reflect the folk adage, ‘friends are for [expressive] pleasure; relatives are for [instrumental] business’” (p.580). However, Granovetter pointed that weak ties (in other words, not relatives) are the ones that can lead an individual to jobs. Thus, does this adage conform most to Wellman’s view that kin are strong, support ties; to Granovetter’s view that weak ties help someone get a job; to neither; or to both?

Finally, Kalmijn looks at women and men’s social networks during various stages life stages relating to dating and marriage. He finds that an individual’s friendship networks become smaller over the life course. This finding is different than the notion that a person takes on his or her partner’s social network when they begin to live together. Kalmijn’s study involves a large sample size and identifies interesting trends.

I found it particularly interesting that (a) “[w]omen have more frequent contacts with friends than men” (p.247) and (b) “having children seems to decrease the relative share of join contacts for women” (p.247). Kalmijn thus concludes that women are not socially dependent on men for friends; he juxtaposes such a deduction to the economic theory that women are economically dependent on men for resources. I ask: Do you think that there is any correlation between social dependency and economic dependency here? Do you think that the same social findings would have been determined a couple of generations ago?