Multidimensional homophily in friendship networks

Abstract

Homophily – the tendency for individuals to associate with similar others – is one of the most persistent findings in social network analysis. Its importance is established along the lines of a multitude of sociologically relevant dimensions, e.g. sex, ethnicity and social class. Existing research, however, mostly focuses on one dimension at a time. But people are inherently multidimensional, have many attributes and are members of multiple groups. In this article, we explore such multidimensionality further in the context of network dynamics. Are friendship ties increasingly likely to emerge and persist when individuals have an increasing number of attributes in common? We analyze eleven friendship networks of adolescents, draw on stochastic actor-oriented network models and focus on the interaction of established homophily effects. Our results indicate that main effects for homophily on various dimensions are positive. At the same time, the interaction of these homophily effects is negative. There seems to be a diminishing effect for having more than one attribute in common. We conclude that studies of homophily and friendship formation need to address such multidimensionality further.

Institutional Equivalence: How Industry and Community Peers Influence Corporate Philanthropy

“…This prediction is consistent with research on cognitive categorization, which has shown that similarity on multiple dimensions, rather than just a single dimension, is a critical variable influencing whether managers perceive another organization as part of their firm's peer group (e.g., Lant and Baum 1995 equivalents constitute an especially influential reference group also dovetails with the general sociological observation that social actors tend to interact with, and are most likely to be influenced by, other actors who are like themselves along multiple dimensions (see Moody 2001, Block andGrund 2014). Consider, for example, the situation of Bank of America in 2006, the last year in our empirical observation period.…”

Ethnic segregation of friendship networks in school: Testing a rational-choice argument of differences in ethnic homophily between classroom- and grade-level networks

“…While initiating and maintaining friendship ties generally requires costs in the form of investment in time and effort, interactions with similar others lower these transaction costs and are more rewarding (Block and Grund, 2014;Völker et al, 2008: 327). For example, same-ethnic peers are more likely to share similar experiences, attitudes, and values.…”

“…In contrast to 9 Excluding ego and alter effects for the different ethnic groups may bias the estimate of the respective dyadic effect (see Goodreau et al, 2009;Wimmer and Lewis, 2010). Many studies that focus on ethnic groups exclude these effects due to convergence issues resulting from including the necessarily large amount of additional model parameters (e.g., Block and Grund, 2014;Stark and Flache, 2012). Technically, in our case, including ego and alter effects for all ethnic groups (except the reference category) did not result in major convergence issues.…”

“…Third, we used the transitive triplets effect to control for the tendency of students to become friends with the friends of their friends. As further controls, we added ego, alter, and samesex effects to account for a preference for same-sex friends that has consistently been found in research on adolescents' schoolbased friendship networks (e.g., Block and Grund, 2014;Cheadle and Schwadel, 2012;Geven et al, 2013;Stark and Flache, 2012;Vermeij et al, 2009). Finally, we included two additional dyadic covariates, same neighborhood and same elementary school, to control for whether students knew each other from contexts other than their current school, as this would be an alternative mechanism that may result in the emergence or durability of grade-level friendships (Mouw and Entwisle, 2006;Vermeij et al, 2009).…”

Social Influence on Observed Race

“…Indeed, empirical studies confirm that friendships and other close relationships tend to form based on racial homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). In a school context, several studies find that students from similar racial backgrounds are more likely to befriend each other (e.g., Moody 2001;Block and Grund 2014;Leszczensky and Pink 2015;Smith et al 2016). Boda and Néray (2015) also show that classifications of each other are more important for social ties than self-classifications: individuals choose friends based on how they classify each other, not how others classify themselves.…”