Homophily and Network Size
The readings for this week focused on homophily, the concept that people choose their friends and the individuals in their networks based on personal similarities. McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook in “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” quote Plato’s observation of the homophily phenomenon, “similarity begets friendship.” This gut instinct has been observed since the foundation of friendship and the authors of “Birds of a Feather,” do a nice job of summarizing the results of many studies on the choices that people make when it comes to friendship. They focus on the difference between baseline homophily and inbreeding homophily and they ways that those two forms affect an individual’s choices. Baseline homophily, the demography of the potential tie pool has a large effect on the categories of race and religion because of environmental factors such as economic inequalities and the distribution of religious groups between the Northeast and the South. Inbreeding homophily has more of an impact on when looking at behavior-based groups. Though this article acts as more of a summary than research paper, some of the information they chose to cite was less compelling than other information. For example, they suggest that African American youths exhibit more inbreeding homophily in than Anglo youths. While this may be true, it exposes the possibility that many factors could explain why people choose to become friends with people like themselves. While they use the distribution of religious groups to explain inbreeding homophily when it comes to religion, they offer no suggestions for why it is that African-Americans practice inbreeding homophily at such high levels. My question for discussion is what role to you think prior exclusion from the social pool plays in minorities’ tendencies to practice inbreeding homophily (stick together).
“Homophily and Assimilation Among Sport-Active Adolescent Substance Users” seeks to analyze the co-evolution of substance abuse behaviors in adolescents and also discuss assimilation and homophily. I found this article to be the most difficult out of this week's readings. I thought the method and the questions they sought to answer confusing in particular. I could not come up with a comprehensible way to separate the groups that they identified in the study; I was unable to understand what role different activities play in homophily when it seems like drug choice and sports affect homophily independently. I also found the method confusing because they use coding and survey form instead of the methods I’m more familiar with. My question for discussion is how does the variation in he number of choices affect what is coded? (Example, Sport level has two values, 1 and 2, vs. Cannabis use that has 5 levels)
“Social Network Size In Humans” examines the size and quality of social networks by examining Christmas card exchanges. They use questionnaires to measure the number of people that families send cards to, finding a correlation between network size and the age. They conclude that there is a cognitive limit as well as an association between age and network size. “Estimating the Size of Personal Networks” also examines network size but uses math to come to conclusions. They attempt to predict network seize based on a variety of factors including location, and seem to conclude that they need much more research on network size in order to come to any meaningful conclusions or be able to predict accurately.