Homophily in Voluntary Organizations: Status Distance and the Composition of Face-to-Face Groups

Choosing Work Group Members: Balancing Similarity, Competence, and Familiarity

“…First, we examined the contribution of homophily to people's choice of group members. Homophily was selected first because it is one of the most robust findings in social psychology and should therefore have strong explanatory effects as a predictor (Lott & Lott, 1965;McPherson & Smith-Lovin, 1987). Second, we examined the effect of competence.…”

“…In our setting, the subjects all have the same tenure in the organization (college juniors), are approximately the same age, and have essentially the same educational background. According to McPherson and Smith-Lovin (1987), our groups have a high level of induced homophily-that is, their options of interacting with dissimilar people are limited because of the built-in homophily within the organization. We therefore focused on gender, race, and role in our homophily measures.…”

Preference effects on friendship choice: Evidence from an online field experiment

“…This example illustrates the importance of "structural constraint" in friendship choice, which has long been recognized in sociology. Social structures, such as schools, neighborhoods, organizations, or metropolitan areas (Feld, 1981;Kornrich, 2009;Kossinets and Watts, 2009;McPherson and Smith-Lovin, 1987;Mouw and Entwisle, 2006;Tilly, 1999;Wimmer and Lewis, 2010) "govern social relations among their incumbents" (Blau, 1974: 616). Because such social structures create social boundaries between individuals and segregate them into limited social circles, within which social interactions such as friendship take place, social structures are said to impose opportunity constraints on social interactions, i.e., limit possibilities for social interactions within shared social circles.…”

“…For instance, researchers have adapted dyad analysis to eliminate the confounding effect of group size (Hallinan and Teixeira, 1987;Moody, 2001;Quillian and Campbell, 2003;Mouw and Entwisle, 2006); controlled individual-level structural variations, such as shared school activities (Moody, 2001) and school segregation (Mouw and Entwisle, 2006); and used exponential random graph models to take balancing reciprocity into consideration (Goodreau, 2007, Goodreau et al, 2009, Wimmer and Lewis, 2010. Furthermore, separating out the effects of structural constraints has been discussed extensively as a methodological challenge (Cheng and Xie, 2012;Currarini et al, 2010;Feld, 1981;McPherson and Smith-Lovin, 1987;Hallinan and Williams, 1989;McPherson et al, 2001;Moody, 2001;Mayer and Puller, 2008;Quillan and Campbell, 2003;Mouw and Entwisle, 2006;Wimmer and Lewis, 2010;Zeng and Xie, 2008).…”

“…As we discussed above, individuals in actual social settings are segregated into limited social circles by social structures, such as schools, neighborhoods, organizations, metropolitan areas (Feld, 1981;Kornrich, 2009;Kossinets and Watts, 2009;McPherson and Smith-Lovin, 1987;Mouw and Entwisle, 2006;Tilly, 1998;Wimmer and Lewis, 2010), in which their exposure to potential friends is constrained. Hence, observed friendship choices are subjected to the confounding of personal preferences and constrained exposure.…”