Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure

Abstract

Adolescent societies—whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships—exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation mechanisms, namely balance, homophily, and dominance. How do the same micro-mechanisms generate significant variation in global network structures? To answer this question we propose and test a network ecological theory that specifies the ways features of organizational environments moderate the expression of tie-formation processes, thereby generating variability in global network structures across settings. We develop this argument using longitudinal friendship data on schools (Add Health study) and classrooms (Classroom Engagement study), and by extending exponential random graph models to the study of multiple societies over time.

Ethnic Composition and Friendship Segregation: Differential Effects for Adolescent Natives and Immigrants

“…A social-psychological preference for same-ethnic friendship is difficult to measure directly, and for the purpose of this study it is sufficient to regard such a preference as the incidence of same-ethnic friendships in school classes net of the availability of different ethnic groups in those classes ði.e., the opportunity structureÞ and several other possible drivers of same-ethnic friendship. Although there is no perfect fit between same-ethnic friendship preferences in theory and our proxy for same-ethnic friendship preferences, it is consistent with prior published work ðe.g., Stark and Flache 2012;McFarland et al 2014;Smith, Maas, and Van Tubergen 2014Þ. Prior research on ethnic segregation is unclear as to how and why the ethnic composition of a class affects same-ethnic friendship selections above and beyond the opportunity to associate with same-ethnic peers. Part of this confusion can be attributed to different conceptualizations of ethnic composition.…”

A Social Space Approach to Testing Complex Hypotheses: The Case of Hispanic Marriage Patterns in the United States

“…capturing two underlying dimensions (racial/ Hispanic salience). Similar examples can be found in effectively every subfield in the discipline; recent examples include such diverse topics as network structure among adolescents and labor markets in the pre-civil war south (e.g., McFarland et al 2014;Ruef 2012;Smith and Faris 2015). The hope is that this approach will make it easier to characterize theoretical tables in continuous terms: where it becomes easier to specify (and test) complicated hypotheses, those representing blends, or mixtures, of the core hypotheses.…”

Making Friends in Violent Neighborhoods: Strategies among Elementary School Children

“…Because forming friends depends on the decisions that individuals make within structural constraints, researchers have adopted many analytical perspectives. They have focused on individual factors such as race, gender, and class (Eder and Hallinan 1978;Tuma and Hallinan 1979;Haselager et al 1998;Moody 2001;Vaquera and Kao 2008;Crosnoe, Frank, and Mueller 2008;Rude and Herda 2010 ), on dyadic factors such as homophily or reciprocity (Kandel 1978, Goodreau, Kitts, andMorris 2009), on structural factors such as balance and transitivity (Hallinan and Hutchins 1980;McFarland et al 2014;Rambaran et al 2015), and on contextual factors such as classroom size and group assignment (Hallinan 1976;Hallinan and Tuma 1978;Frank, Muller, and Mueller 2013;see Verbrugge 1977).…”