Social Connectedness: Measurement, Determinants, and Effects

Abstract

Social networks can shape many aspects of social and economic activity: migration and trade, job-seeking, innovation, consumer preferences and sentiment, public health, social mobility, and more. In turn, social networks themselves are associated with geographic proximity, historical ties, political boundaries, and other factors. Traditionally, the unavailability of large-scale and representative data on social connectedness between individuals or geographic regions has posed a challenge for empirical research on social networks. More recently, a body of such research has begun to emerge using data on social connectedness from online social networking services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To date, most of these research projects have been built on anonymized administrative microdata from Facebook, typically by working with coauthor teams that include Facebook employees. However, there is an inherent limit to the number of researchers that will be able to work with social network data through such collaborations. In this paper, we therefore introduce a new measure of social connectedness at the US county level. Our Social Connectedness Index is based on friendship links on Facebook, the global online social networking service. Specifically, the Social Connectedness Index corresponds to the relative frequency of Facebook friendship links between every county-pair in the United States, and between every US county and every foreign country. Given Facebook’s scale as well as the relative representativeness of Facebook’s user body, these data provide the first comprehensive measure of friendship networks at a national level.

The socio-economic determinants of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

“…It is evident that the inhomogeneous nature of these spatial patterns has an essential role in propagation of diseases [17]. In this regard, in future versions of this study we aim to incorporate more detailed measures which capture the essence of social connectedness [77] the degree of individualism [78] and/or community mobility data 3 . In addition, the spread of the coronavirus is obviously still in a transient regime.…”

COVID-19 Outbreak, Social Response, and Early Economic Effects: A Global VAR Analysis of Cross-Country Interdependencies

“…Our framework, instead, introduces a different connectivity matrix, based on social networks, which can be promising for a different set of applications. Therefore, our paper is also connected to recent papers that propose the use of Facebook connections to measure social networks across locations (Bailey et al, 2018).…”

“…To this scope, we use daily time series indicators on Social mobility made available by Google. 4 The indicators are obtained using aggregated, anonymized, data from GPS tracking of mobile devices, for users who opted in to 'Google Location History'.…”

“…where F B Connections i,j denotes the number of friendship connections between region i and j, and 4 Google LLC "Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports." https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/ 5 For both Google Trends series, we use both the time series information and the cross-section information, by also extracting the relative popularity of the searches in each country for the period of interest.…”

“…The data used in this paper refer to the measure calculated for March 2020. Bailey et al (2018) proposed the measure to study the effects of social networks across U.S. counties. Other current papers are uncovering the link between social networks and the diffusion of Covid-19 (e.g., Kuchler et al, 2020).…”