Social Network Blog - r32

According to this week's readings, this song lyric from Santana's "Maria, Maria" seems to hold true in actual studies of real-world phenomena. These reading seem to wrap up everything we've studied about social networks so far and used concepts such a multiplexity, homophily, range, volume, and prestige to show how these things divide us and how the current society we live in just tends to divide the rich and the poor even more. While we often tend to think of poverty in terms of lack of economic and consumer resources, these articles and the course in general seem to show that there's an extremely important social component here as well. Considering that we're social creatures and that we naturally tend to network in certain ways (for instance via homophilly) we're led to one of the major problems/questions we've encountered in this course. The question is that given the way that humans network how they do, how are we supposed to intervene and change a system that supports division and inequality? And does it even matter whether or not we do?

In the Fernandez article, they studied network data from a study of poor communities in Chicago, to determine if the ghetto class and extreme poor are socially isolated. They found that this is indeed the case varying over a variety of factors. For instance, ghetto men and women were much less likely to participate in organization and know people of the mainstream stable culture and black women were cut off from almost everyone. This has interesting connections to the Putnam interview we heard earlier in the semester which argued that there was a decline in volunteerism in America and that this was leading to social isolation and possible negative consequences, such as more crime, illegal activity, and social unrest (much like we see in the modern day ghetto). Fernandez et al. also showed that nonworking poor are much less likely to have a spouse than others and that they were less likely to name friends. We also see that increasing poverty in the neighborhood can make these factors even worse for the nonworking poor. This brings up some major concerns considering McPherson's article that very few people talk about important matters with anyone and when they do they often talk to their spouse. The status of poverty and social unrest in many of these neighborhoods is perhaps a testament to the importance of having this very important dimension in your life (of having close confidants). As we saw last week (Dickens), having close confidants is correlated with reduced likelihood of having further heart complicaitons after a heart attack, and in this case lack of close confidants seems to be correlated with increased poverty and misery. If this lack of close confidants really is diminishing trust and causing all of this unrest then we have a clear problem in society that we need to try and fix. Another interesting finding is that we see that black nonworking poor males rely more on kin than do black nonworking poor women and that neighborhood poverty tears men away from their kin while it brings women closer with their kin. This is very interesting considering Wellman's idea that women are the kin keepers, yet among the poor this doesn't seem to be the case. Women's relations with kin do however seem to alter with the neighborhood and in this case the data resemble Bott's in which women in working-class neighborhoods were getting much more kin support than men. The fact that this study can raise so many questions based on past readings shows that there are still many questions and answers needed in the field of social networks and that despite all of these very well-designed and carefully carried out studies (as was the case here) it's very hard to determine definitively what affects our networks in the real world. In any case this paper is strong in it's ability to explain the data and then clearly explain some implications and further research that will lead to the appropriate findings to affect policy and look at poverty dimensions more specifically (rather than just taking an aggregate).

The second reading by Marsden relied heavily on ideas from Granovetter about weak ties and their help in finding a new job. As we've discussed in class, there is a lot of debate around this topic and this is clearly shown in the article. Mardsen et. al question and reject the fact that tie strength is the only factor that's important in determining job-matching and that there are many other factors interacting as well (availability of social resources once they have information, the intersection of employee information seeking with employer information distribution attempts). Thus, just like the Fernandez article we see that there could be a major effect based on the interaction of several variables and this further extends the work of Granovetter, Lin, and Bridges. This article brings up the important point that there are no simple solutions to these major social network problems and issues (i.e. the affect of weak ties) and shows that in the real world too many complexities and factors influence the final outcomes. Rather than invalidating prior research this simply acts as a building block to keep us aware that there is no one magical solution to any problem and that while theories are nice and neat there is always more to consider. I think this article did a particularly good job and noting both the merits and deficits of these prior experiments, while clearly showing their value (even if they couldn't explain all phenomena). I also find this article interesting because it seems to show that the structure of our social networks inherently produces inequality, because those with more prestige have better access to others with more prestige and thus have a clear advantage among the competition. As we see here, prestige of the contact can be very important in obtaining a job and while the studies on wages were inconclusive it shows that people with more occupational prestige and greater resources are at least much more likely to have access to more prestigeous job information than others. This seems to show that although some things are very dependent on how you do on the job (i.e. wages), prior social resources inherently privelege those that are already priveleged and make it much harder for those with less social resources to rise up the ladder. This makes a lot of sense if we compare it to the important points of the Fernandez study, which show that the underclass typically has very few social resources. With this being the case we have a fundamental problem in our current system and these studies make clear we need to continue to study these phenomena and work towards a social solution that takes into account all of the complexities we see in the real world.

1. Based on your reading of the Fernandez study do you think it's possible to ever eliminate or at least greatly reduce the social isolation phenomena we see among the poor or is there always going to be a subset of the population socially isolated? If yes what are some ideas you have about reducing the social isolation? If no why do you feel this is impossible?

2. How do you reconcile the fact that while these studies have shown us a lot, it's very hard if not impossible to incoporate all of the complex factors involved in social networks in our studies? Are any individual studies playing too much of role in our knowledge of social networks or do you see the literature as fairly balanced and working together and building on each other to try and find a larger solution to these core network issues?