Structure in personal networks: Constructing and comparing typologies

Abstract

A recurrent finding in personal network research is that individual and social outcomes are influenced not just by the kind of people one knows, but also by how those people are connected to each other. Personal network structure – the way in which one’s personal contacts know and interact with each other – reflects broader trends in social organization and personal communities, and shapes patterns of social capital, support, and isolation. This article proposes a method to identify typologies of structure in large collections of personal networks. The method is applied to six datasets collected in widely different circumstances and using various survey instruments. It is then compared with another recently introduced method to extract typologies of egocentric network structure. Findings show that personal network structure can be effectively summarized using just three measures of cohesive subgroup characteristics. Structural typologies can then be identified by applying standard cluster analysis techniques to the three variables. Both methods considered in the article capture significant variation in network structures, but they also show substantial levels of disagreement and cross-classification. I discuss similarities and differences between the methods, and potential applications of the proposed typologies to substantive research on personal communities, social support, and social capital.

Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships

“…Carter et al (2017) showed that cooperative vampire bats may invest in quantity of social relationships at the expense of relationship quality, yet it remains unknown what strategy performs best for this species under a volatile social environment. The same applies in the other empirical studies showing some differential investment in quantity vs. quality of social relationships (Sutcliffe & Crabbe 1963, Amato 1993, Entwisle et al 2007, Sato & Zenou 2015, Vacca 2019, Silk et al 1999, Ellis et al 2019, Morrison et al 2020, Menz et al 2020, Bond et al 2021.…”

“…Carter et al (2017) showed that cooperative vampire bats may invest in quantity of social relationships at the expense of relationship quality; the authors named this strategy a 'social bet-hedging strategy', as the diversified portfolio of acquaintances may protect against the worst-case outcome of none of one's few friends remaining alive. Differential investment in quantity vs. quality of social relationships has also been observed in humans (Sutcliffe & Crabbe 1963, Amato 1993, Entwisle et al 2007, Sato & Zenou 2015, Vacca 2019, in nonhuman primates (Silk et al 1999, Ellis et al 2019, Morrison et al 2020, and in other mammals such as kangaroos (Menz et al 2020) and giraffes (Bond et al 2021). There is surprisingly little theory on the evolutionary forces shaping the cooperative strategies that ultimately determine the individuals' social environment, which has potentially important consequences on survival (Snyder-Mackler 2020), and which in turn may feed back into the stability of the social environment itself.…”

Prognostic targets recognition of rectal adenocarcinoma based on transcriptomics

“…The change of these 2 biological processes in tumor microenvironment has been proved closely related to tumor metastasis and invasion. [ 25 ] By using GS algorithm and PageRank algorithm, we found that 7 genes including MMP14, SDC2, LAMC1, ELN, ACTA2, ZNF532, and CYBRD1 were negatively correlated with the OS of READ.…”

A clustering procedure for mixed-type data to explore ego network typologies: an application to elderly people living alone in Italy

“…Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the analysis of personal networks and their application in many areas of the social sciences. Research in this field has shown the importance of network characteristics, such as size and composition, to assess the impact of social relationships on many aspects of everyday life, e.g., social support, well-being, health, and mobility (see, among others, Vacca (2020), Dykstra et al (2016), Amati et al (2015), Gallagher and Vella-Brodrick (2008), Taylor (2007)). In the social network literature Breiger (2004), an ego-centered (or egocentric) network (hereafter, ego network) forms around a particular social actor (the ego), and involves all other actors (the alters) with whom an ego enjoys a specific type of relation (e.g.…”

“…Among recent works that provided a strong contribution in this field, the authors in Bidart et al (2018) presented a typology of personal networks only based on indicators related to the structure of relations between alters, and analyzed data from a longitudinal study on young French people. Vacca (2020) reviewed existing methods to identify types of ego network structure, and proposed a novel approach to detect typologies based on three measures summarizing the overall structural configuration of a personal network; finally, he compared the results with those from the method introduced by Bidart et al (2018). When typologies of support are of interest (e.g., with the elderly and with the immigrant population), the most common approach is to use indicators of size and composition of the social support providers system.…”