Trace of pace, place, and space in personal relationships: The chronogeometrics of studying relationships at scale

Abstract

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.

Acquaintanceships (weak ties): Their role in people's web of relationships and their formation

“…Structural aspects, such as network size, composition (e.g., degree of homogamy, ratio of acquaintances to closer ties), and density (the degree to which network members know each other), may have implications for individual health and well‐being. With the increased access to data from communication technologies (phone logs, text messages) and social media, “digital footprints” can be increasingly used to study the structural aspects of acquaintance networks and their implications for individuals and their close relationships (e.g., Ghosh et al, 2019; Mac Carron et al, 2016; Striga & Podobnik, 2018), as well as the process of relationship formation (Brinberg et al, 2021) and relating (Spitzberg, 2019).…”