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People form relationships with people from their own racial groups, a phenomenon called racial homophily, which reduces interracial contact and exacerbates inequality and prejudice. Although viewed as arising from environmental factors, we argue that racial homophily also involves individual choice and, thus, personality factors. We address three major issues. First, are interpersonal concerns (Agreeableness) and intergroup concerns (Openness) differentially relevant to cross-race friendships? Second, are current conceptions of Openness sufficient, or do we need lower-level facets more attuned to intergroup concerns? Third, can we specify the interplay between personality and contextual factors in different settings? Across four studies (total N = 1,820), Agreeableness failed to predict more cross-race friendships, in both self- and peer reports, suggesting that interpersonal kindness was not sufficient to overcome racial homophily. In contrast, Openness and Openness to Other (O2, a new social facet of Openness) consistently predicted cross-race friendship. However, the O2 facet had the stronger and only unique effect, suggesting it is the "active ingredient." High-O2 individuals had an almost equal 1:1 ratio of same-to-different-race network members, whereas low-O2 individuals had 4:1 same-race. These results held for both college students and middle-aged adults, both friends and new acquaintances in the network, and both networks established before and at a diverse university. Finally, when moving to a more diverse environment, high-O2 individuals seemed to take advantage of the new environmental affordances, adding more different-race members to their networks. Overall, these studies advance understanding of person–environment transactions, showing how personality traits matter to the structure of people's social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of personal relationships has traditionally relied on self‐reports or observations of face‐to‐face interaction. Digital media increasingly provide the ability to trace communication and relationships at scale. Such methods portend significant theoretical and methodological challenges, as well as potential. As a way of illustrating such potential, big data approaches to the select traditional relational concepts of routine relating, propinquity, homophily, small world, and reciprocity are reviewed. The fields of communication and personal relationships will need to inform such research by developing their own interdisciplinary relationships with geographic information sciences, computational linguistics, and computer sciences or cede a significant frontier of their field to these other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a network analysis of word-of-mouth referral behavior in a natural environment. The relational properties of tie strength and homophily were employed to examine referral behavior at micro and macro levels of inquiry. The study demonstrates different roles played by weak and strong social ties. At the macro level, weak ties displayed an important bridging function, allowing information to travel from one distinct subgroup of referral actors to another subgroup in the broader social system. At the micro level, strong and homophilous ties were more likely to be activated for the flow of referral information. Strong ties were also perceived as more influential than weak ties, and they were more likely to be utilized as sources of information for related goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that two network mechanisms operate to create and reinforce gender inequalities in the organizational distribution of power: sex differences in homophily (i.e., tendency to form same-sex network relationships) and in the ability to convert individual attributes and positional resources into network advantages. These arguments were tested in a network analytic study of men's and women's interaction patterns in an advertising firm. Men were more likely to form homophilous ties across multiple networks and to have stronger homophilous ties, while women evidenced a differentiated network pattern in which they obtained social support and friendship from women and instrumental access through network ties to men. Although centrality in organization-wide networks did not vary by sex once controls were instituted, relative to women, men appeared to reap greater network returns from similar individual and positional resources, as well as from homophilous relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital traces of U.S. members of congress on Twitter enable researchers to observe how these public officials interact with one another in a direct and unobtrusive manner. Using data from Twitter and other sources (e.g., roll-call vote data), this study aims to examine how members of congress connect and communicate with one another on Twitter, why they will connect and communicate with one another in such a way, and what effects such connection and communication among members of congress have on their floor vote behavior. The follower-followee and communication networks of members of congress on Twitter demonstrate a high degree of partisan homogeneity. Members of congress prefer to follow or communicate with other members who are similar to them in terms of partisanship, home state, chamber, and public concern. This condition is known as the homophily effect in social network research. However, the magnitude of the homophily effect is mitigated when the effects of endogenous networking mechanisms (i.e., reciprocity and triadic closure) in such networks are controlled. Follower-followee ties can facilitate political discourse among members of congress on Twitter, whereas both follower-followee and communication ties on Twitter increase the likelihood of vote agreement among members of congress. The theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of the findings are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friendship is seen as an important factor in influencing the peer-to-peer social relationships and attitudes during their adolescence. However, few researchers observe adolescents' antipathy networks and study the extent to which such negative relationship influences adolescents' behaviours and attitudes. In this study, I use social network analysis to estimate the influence of friendship and antipathy between adolescents by calculating Euclidean distance in network structure and compare the distance effects of these two opposite forces on their attitude similarity. The preliminary findings show that friends do not necessarily have similar attitudes towards any dimensions of life experience, but strong friendship networks provide significant support for adolescents' emotional stability, while antipathy networks enhance the tension and conflict between peer foes because of their similar attitudes on the strong sense of ego. This result implies that friends' similarity is not as significant as studies have overwhelmingly shown as prior studies argue. Friends' and foes' similarity could be associated with the friendship and antipathy networks only by understanding the context of the interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The strength of a tie is feature commonly studied in the analysis of personal networks. It is data apparently simple to create, that offers a great predictive potential on the exchanges that take place within a relationship, and of its position within the network. However, the wide diversity of indicators that can be found in the literature show evidence of the vagueness in the definition of the concept and the subsequent difficulty to operationalize it, returning mixed results in empirical observation. With this theoretical, methodological and empirical revision, the authors aim to contribute to the definition of the concept. A theoretical dimensionalization of the concept is proposed, distinguishing the expressive, social and structural aspects of the notion. A comparison of various indicators of the different dimensions is offered, using a sample of 441 personal networks and 13,230 relationships, from a survey conducted in Catalonia between 2009 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homophily promotes the development of social relationships within social groups and increases segregation across groups. Although prior research has demonstrated that network segregation operates in many dimensions such as race and gender, sexual orientation has received little attention. This study investigates what accounts for the segregation between gay, lesbian and bisexual friends and straight friends in GLB youth's personal networks by testing three possible underlying mechanisms – structural constraints, choice homophily and compartmentalization attempts. The analysis uses data collected from GLB youth who were becoming members of a community organization in Indiana from 1994 through 1998. Although the small, convenience sample does not allow generalization of the results, the rich network data provide important insights into personal network segregation in this unique social context. The results suggest that the segregation between GLB and straight friends result from structural constraints and friends' preference to interact within their groups, and that the focal GLB youth's effort to compartmentalize his or her sexual identity accounts little for the segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this study is to analyse the production of space in the CouchSurfing hospitality network in Russia. The article proposes the notion of xenotopos, which literally means 'the place of strangers', in order to capture the relational dynamics of host and guest interactions and their co-present experience of space, time and life rhythms. The article examines the interaction between the spatial knowledge of the host and of the guest in order to see how the sharing of this knowledge affects the spatial trajectory of the guest. The article also considers the potential applicability of the concept of rhythm in the analysis of CouchSurfing as a spatial practice. The findings suggest that CouchSurfing allows users to open up new spaces of hospitality situated away from conventional tourist circuits by accessing local knowledge and grasping local life rhythms, both of which become essential intangible aspects of the CouchSurfing experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to establish levels of peer homogeneity --sometimes called homophily in the literature-- in the use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana in friendship relations in early adolescence. Longitudinal data from a representative sample of school population of the Metropolitan Region of Chile was used to identify friendship dyads between students in 7th and 8th grades. Additionally, some estimates about the origin of the observed homophily are provided, as a result of selection processes in which similarity precedes friendship or, alternatively, as a result of influence processes where friendship leads to matching pairs. The results show that initiation into drugs takes place in environments that are moderately homogeneous and that influence effects are more important than selection effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the pattern of social interaction and integration among 31 faculty members and 84 master's students who enrolled in a cohort-wide core course, PAD 507: Professional Applications I, offered by the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany-SUNY during the Fall 2007 semester. A primary goal of the cohort-wide course is to encourage students to mix with other students in a diverse educational environment and provide better access to faculty members. However, our findings from longitudinal social network analysis suggest that students strongly prefer interpersonal relationships with similar others-what social network analysts refer to as a preference for homophily. That is, students tend to build networks characterized by shared attributes, such as gender, domestic/international status, and participation in a graduate assistantship, despite efforts in PAD 507 to encourage social mixing. Students do tend to rapidly broaden their networks through course and group activities during the first 8 weeks of the term, but the newly constructed relationships tend to reinforce a preference for "birds of a feather" to flock together. Moreover, the networks shaped in early stages of the term appear to persist. For programs that wish to encourage social mixing (and we argue that they should), our findings suggest that homophily is difficult but not impossible to counterbalance through programmatic choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of network formation emphasize the importance of social similarity and propinquity in producing strong interpersonal connections. The positive effect each factor can have on tie strength has been documented across a number of studies, and yet we know surprisingly very little about how the two factors combine to produce strong ties. Being in close proximity could either amplify or dampen the positive effect that social similarity can have on tie strength. Data on tie strength among teachers working in five public schools were analyzed to shed light on this theoretical question. The empirical results indicate that teachers who were similar in age were more likely to be connected by a strong tie, especially teachers for whom age similarity was more likely to be salient. Moreover, teachers who took breaks at the same time or who had classrooms on the same floor communicated more frequently and felt more emotionally attached. Among the public school teachers, propinquity amplified the positive effect that age similarity had on tie strength. The strongest network connections occurred among age-similar teachers who had classrooms on the same floor. The empirical results illustrate the value of considering how social similarity and propinquity contribute to strong ties independently and when combined with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate whether need for closure affects how people seek order in judging social relations. In Study 1, the authors find that people who have a high need for closure (NFC) were more likely to assume their social contacts were connected to each other (i.e., transitivity) when this was not the case. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors examine another form of order in network relations—racial homophily—and find that high-NFC participants were more inclined to believe that 2 individuals from the same racial category (e.g., African American) were friends than two racially dissimilar individuals. Furthermore, high-NFC individuals were more likely to make errors when judging a racially mixed group of people; specifically, they recalled more racial homophily (racially similar people sitting closer together) than had actually appeared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although studies show that health inequities between ethnic groups exist, few have expressed interest in the origins of these disparities. As homophily (the phenomenon that people principally form relationships with those who are similar to them) influences people’s norms and interactions, it might be an important property of migrants’ networks, and have implications on their health. The aim of this study is to examine health inequities between natives and immigrants in Sweden and the health consequences arising from participation in homogenous migrant networks. Using total population registers and representative survey data initial analyses show that migrants experience poorer health than native Swedes. The findings further suggest that homophily is a prominent feature of migrant social networks and that migrants in networks with a high proportion of other migrants experience poorer health than those who include a high proportion of natives in their networks. However, unhealthy behaviour and disadvantaged social conditions may account for a considerable share of their excess risk. Hence, network closure may reinforce and maintain norms leading to negative behaviour and social conditions in such networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of friendship formation that sheds light on segregation patterns observed in social and economic networks. Individuals have types and see type-dependent benefits from friendships. We examine the properties of a steady-state equilibrium of a matching process of friendship formation. We use the model to understand three empirical patterns of friendship formation: (i) larger groups tend to form more same-type ties and fewer other-type ties than small groups, (ii) larger groups form more ties per capita, and (iii) all groups are biased towards same-type relative to demographics, with the most extreme bias coming from middle-sized groups. We show how these empirical observations can be generated by biases in preferences and biases in meetings. We also illustrate some welfare implications of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longitudinal behavioral data generally contains a significant amount of structure. In this work, we identify the structure inherent in daily behavior with models that can accurately analyze, predict, and cluster multimodal data from individuals and communities within the social network of a population. We represent this behavioral structure by the principal components of the complete behavioral dataset, a set of characteristic vectors we have termed eigenbehaviors. In our model, an individual’s behavior over a specific day can be approximated by a weighted sum of his or her primary eigenbehaviors. When these weights are calculated halfway through a day, they can be used to predict the day’s remaining behaviors with 79% accuracy for our test subjects. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential for this dimensionality reduction technique to infer community affiliations within the subjects’ social network by clustering individuals into a “behavior space” spanned by a set of their aggregate eigenbehaviors. These behavior spaces make it possible to determine the behavioral similarity between both individuals and groups, enabling 96% classification accuracy of community affiliations within the population-level social network. Additionally, the distance between individuals in the behavior space can be used as an estimate for relational ties such as friendship, suggesting strong behavioral homophily amongst the subjects. This approach capitalizes on the large amount of rich data previously captured during the Reality Mining study from mobile phones continuously logging location, proximate phones, and communication of 100 subjects at MIT over the course of 9 months. As wearable sensors continue to generate these types of rich, longitudinal datasets, dimensionality reduction techniques such as eigenbehaviors will play an increasingly important role in behavioral research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite efforts to increase diversity among companies' leaders, a phenomenon known as homophily—the tendency of individuals to like and associate with others who are similar to themselves—remains prevalent. Homophily can have serious implications for leaders and their organizations, jeopardizing morale and stifling innovation and strategic renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the relations between group context and self-and other-perceptions of aggressive behavior in an ethnically-diverse sample of 168 male and female grade 7 adolescents. We used self-and peer-reports of aggression in high-and average-aggressive mixed-sex and same-sex cliques to examine whether group members would assimilate their self-report of aggression to the aggression report of their peers by way of perceived homophily or, conversely, engage in contrast and see their level of aggression as comparatively low in the face of high-aggression peers. Among boys in mixed-sex groups, comparison with highly-aggressive others resulted in a self-perception of lower levels of aggression than those perceived by their peers. Conversely, girls in mixed-sex groups reported their own levels of aggression to be higher than those perceived by their peers. We interpret these findings in terms of the notion of “norm narrowing”: rather than being set by the larger social environment, such as the school, norms are more narrowly determined within one''s immediate peer group. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we utilize the concepts of homophily, blending, and amalgamation to describe the possible friendship patterns of multiracials. Homophily occurs when multiracials are most likely to choose other multiracials as friends. Blending occurs when friendship patterns of multiracials are somewhere in-between those of their monoracial counterparts. Amalgamation consists of friendship patterns that are similar to one of their monoracial counterparts. All groups exhibit signs of amalgamation such that non-white multiracials resemble Blacks, and White multiracials resemble whites except for Black-White multiracials. Black-Whites, Asian-Whites, and Asian-Blacks also exhibit signs of blending, while only Native American multiracials show signs of homophily. Multiracials have different experiences depending on their specific racial composition, and while they seem to bridge the distance between racial groups, their friendship patterns also fall along Black and White lines. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This manuscript examines the relationships among friendship style and several relational variables across three different age cohorts from a socioemotional selectivity theory perspective. Participants (N = 144) from three age groups were asked to evaluate a significant friendship in terms of quality of talk, level of emotional support, and perceptions of homophily. The results indicated that individuals with discerning friendship styles had longer friendships than people with independent or acquisitive styles. In addition, older individuals were more likely to have a discerning friendship style. The data were inconsistent with any significant differences for homophily. Those with a discerning friendship style reported higher levels of emotional support than either independents or acquisitives. Acquisitives had the highest evaluations of the quality of talk followed by discerning and then independents. The results provide some support for socioemotional selectivity theory, although several limitations and directions for future research are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three decades ago measures of interpersonal attraction and homophily were introduced to the field. A substantial number of research studies have been reported that employed one or more of these measures. This research was examined to evaluate their reliability and validity. It is concluded that all of these measures are reasonably reliable and valid. However, since the reliabilities have been highly variable, it was determined that improved measures should be used in the future. Second generation, revised and improved, versions of these measures are reported and recommended for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the combined influence of three causal mechanisms shaping interpersonal dynamics. Sharing a demographic characteristic has been shown to strengthen a relationship between people. The initial explanation for this positive effect emphasized the importance of individual preferences for social contact. Similar people share common interests, which makes them more attractive as exchange partners. More recent explanations have highlighted the important role of identification and competition. Identification increases the tendency for strong ties to develop among similar people, while competition reduces that tendency. I argue that tie strength is a function of all three mechanisms: a baseline level of interpersonal attraction, a positive identification effect, and a negative competition adjustment. Identification and competition vary with the number of people sharing the focal attribute to define a predictable association between sharing the focal attribute and the strength of a network connection. Predictions are tested with tenure and tie-strength data from a small research and development firm. Analysis indicates that having the same tenure has the predicted effect on communication frequency. The implications of the findings are discussed for homophily research in particular and demography research in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines studies of transitivity and homophily in an empirical analysis of personal network integration. Using a national sample of individual's personal networks, the paper reveals that transitivity explains a majority of cases of network integration with two important caveats: (1) recent work on networks and social structure points to important structural constraints on personal networks that shape their formation, and (2) homophily (e.g. sex or race) and choice homophily (e.g, religion) improve the likelihood of integration in personal networks. The results indicate that the second finding interacts with relationship length and the availability of focal points to organize individual contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of friendship choice data by focusing on homophily (or inbreeding bias) and social distance revealed in the patterns of both association between subjects' and friends' statuses and association among friends' statuses. These two aspects of inbreeding bias and social distance are simultaneously taken into account in modeling the data of friendship choice from subjects with different numbers of friends. The statuses of friends are expressed in terms of their combinations rather than their full cross-classifications. Conditionally symmetric log-bilinear partial association models are usefully employed for the analysis. The structural characteristics of inbreeding bias and social distance are identified by comparing nested models and through the interpretation of parameters estimated from models that adequately fit the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses data collected on 42 women and 432 members of their social networks across a 10-year period beginning with the women's return to school in midlife. The paper addresses three questions: (1) To what extent did the same individuals continue to be active members of the women's social support networks across the decade; (2) to what extent did educational similarity explain which individuals continued to be active members of the women's networks; and (3) did educational similarity explain patterns of both support and socializing? The analyses revealed that between one-quarter and one-third of the associates named as sources of school/work support, general emotional support or socializing continued to be named 10 years after the first interview. The analyses also demonstrated that associates' educational attainment was important in explaining which individuals continued to serve as sources of support for school/work; however, educational attainment was not important in explaining which associates continued to serve as sources of either general emotional support or socializing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the state of communication research in source perception and anticipates its future, presents an alternative theoretic perspective, and, finally, offers preliminary empirical data supporting this perspective. Most of the research in source credibility, homophily, attraction and power has been directed toward determining the nature of these source perceptions rather than their origin or effects. Empirical attempts at refinement of homophily, attraction and power seem similarly susceptible to criticism. Simply, research designed to determine generalizable scales for the measurement of the source perception constructs has resulted in sets of scales appropriate only for increasingly specific combinations of sources, topics, receivers and cultures.

Comprehensive and quantitative investigations of social theories and phenomena increasingly benefit from the vast breadth of data describing human social relations that is now available within the realm of computational social science. Such data are, however, typically proxies for one of the many interaction layers composing social networks, which can be defined in many ways and are composed of communication of various types (e.g., phone calls, face-to-face communication, etc.). As a result, many studies focus on one single layer, corresponding to the data at hand. Several studies have however shown that these layers are not interchangeable, despite the presence of a certain level of correlation between them. Here, we investigate whether different layers of interactions among individuals lead to similar conclusions with respect to the presence of homophily patterns in a population—homophily represents one of the widest studied phenomenon in social networks. To this aim, we consider a data set describing interactions and links of various nature in a population of Asian students with diverse nationalities, first language and gender. We study homophily patterns, as well as their temporal evolution in each layer of the social network. To facilitate our analysis, we put forward a general method to assess whether the homophily patterns observed in one layer inform us about patterns in another layer. For instance, our study reveals that three network layers—cell phone communications, questionnaires about friendship, and trust relations—lead to similar and consistent results despite some minor discrepancies. The homophily patterns of the co-presence network layer, however, does not yield any meaningful information about other network layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]