Les significations des zéros dans les réseaux personnels

Abstract

The Significance of Zero in Personal Networks: Missing ties are differently interpreted regarding various sociological paradigms and kinds of issues: some are of upmost importance while others are trivial. Furthermore, some are only weakly absent during a given period, and it should be interesting to reveal their potential existence.

Ties that Bother - Ties that Matter

“…Generally, this issue is omitted in scientific literature. Notwithstanding, Alexis Ferrand (2014) in one of his theoretical articles dealt with the issue of missing ties, which he also called the “relationships with quality zero” and explained that the absence of a tie implies the existence of one or more other types of relationship. Then, he presented three different explanations of the absence of a tie (depending on a relevant content and a sociological paradigm used) and concluded that not all zero-quality ties are equivalent.…”

“…Whereas, Defossez (2014) enumerated different tie constraints that hamper the mobilization of resources, Bès and Chauvac (2014) revealed the latent chains of ties that are not being activated for certain purposes due to different reasons. The rest of the articles analyse distinct non-positive ties: negative (Chauvac, 2014), missing (Ferrand, 2014), and non-relationships (Plessard, 2014).…”

Sources et données pour l’analyse des réseaux sociaux

“…Il s'agit d'explorer toutes les pistes permettant de distinguer les non-liens probables des inconnues complètes. Dans un des rares articles discutant explicitement du sens des « zéros », Alexis Ferrand (2014) rappelle que les méthodes classiques (dites de générateurs de noms -voir plus loin) demandant d'énoncer des listes de noms ne donnent pas l'exhaustivité du réseau relationnel : par exemple, dans la réalité, si la première personne à laquelle on penserait spontanément à demander de l'aide n'est pas disponible, on fait souvent appel à une autre. Le fait de ne pas lister une relation en réponse à une question ne signifie pas qu'elle n'a aucune probabilité d'exister à un moment, mais il est très difficile d'enquêter sur cette probabilité.…”

On Negative Genesis – The Role of Dyadic and Network Attributes in the Emergence of Hostile Relationships

“… 1. A rich selection of contributes presented to this conferences has been published in BMS: Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique 121 (January 2014). See for example Cloutier et al (2014) and Ferrand (2014). …”

“… 3. For example, we think that “relational attitude” played a significant role in raising their motivation to completely (and, hopefully, in the most honest way possible) fill the long and complex questionnaires and so granting us the high return obtained in these 2 waves. In the first one, for example, the return of complete questionnaires was of 100%: such result let us avoid all the insidious difficulties caused by the reconstruction of an incomplete social network structure (Ferrand, 2014). …”