networks

The Chicago Tribune reports on recent research by University of Chicago sociologist, Mario Small, who studies mothers with young children in high-quality child care centers. He reports that “Parents come to school to find someone to care for their children. But they end up finding ways to take care of each other.”

Further:

What he found was that, after their children’s enrollment, the women were able to access information they didn’t have before — the same kind of resources that can be so essential to career and financial success, but can also help build strong and stable families. He also found that women with children in day care had more friends and lower incidence of depression than those with children at home.

Small calls it “social capital” and says that the ties forged between parents can be as valuable as more formal networks, such as alumni groups, country clubs and fraternal organizations.

Small finds this to be consistent across class and race:

In 2004, he surveyed 300 randomly selected child care centers and preschools, located in four ethnically distinct neighborhoods, along with data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study of 3,500 parents in the nation’s 20 largest cities. He found that the benefits cut across class and racial lines. But for low-income parents, the payoff was even more significant, said the sociologist. Those who had no clue about how to access elite private schools, for example, were able to learn the admissions game, from interviews to scholarships.

This sociological finding isn’t necessarily surprising to parents and service providers:

There’s much that child care providers can do to facilitate these links, according to Celena Roldan of Erie Neighborhood House, which has four Chicago sites that offer a range of services for children, including day care. Ties are strengthened through book fairs, field trips and a parents’ council.

“We expected to educate parents about their kids … but what we didn’t realize was how much of the parents’ own mental health and sense of well-being would be affected,” Roldan said. “And when our parents feel better about themselves, it impacts their children.”

Marisol Rodriguez, 35, said that while Erie House parents may inquire about play dates and carpooling, she’s also found herself offering advice on life issues, such as going back to school.

“With all the outings and things, it’s easy to become friends with the other moms,” said the Southwest Side resident, who has a 3- and 5-year-old in Erie House’s child care, as well as two older kids in the after-school program.

Increased social capital may, it seems, be an added parental perk of child care.

Earlier this week Forbes.com ran a story about pet culture in the U.S. in the 21st century, which has transformed our four-legged pets into our children.

About the trend:

America’s cultural pendulum has swung toward pets. 71% of U.S. households own a pet, and most are willing to spend vast amounts of time and money to keep Sparky and Fluffy happy. The pet industry has tripled in the past 15 years. The APPA estimates pet spending will reach $45.4 billion this year, an increase of $2 billion since 2008–despite the crippling recession.

In the last few years, they’ve exploded into popular culture, too. As Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson are splashed across the celebrity glossies with their furry friends, the broader media followed suit. People.com offers the offshoot People Pets.com, AOL draws audiences with its new site Paw Nation, and icanhascheezburger.com gets hundreds of submissions daily of user-generated lol cats (laugh-out-loud funny photos of cats). Bo, America’s “First Dog,” is still making headlines.

And sociological commentary…

“People are fascinated by pets. We act and spend on them as if they were our children,” says NYU sociology professor Colin Jerolmack, who studies animals in society. “We’ve civilized them to the point that they are no longer a part of wild nature.” It wasn’t always so. Just over a century ago in the 1800s it was very rare to have a pet, Jerolmack says. They were luxury items and status symbols of the bourgeoisie, showcasing that a family had the means and resources to own a pet. Animals then were purely functional; dogs were often used to hunt, and cats used to scare off mice. As society developed and technology advanced, the utilitarian use of pets waned.

And from another sociologist…

Author of Understanding Dogs, sociologist Clinton Sanders, says pet obsession has been rapidly growing during the past 20 years. “The danger is that we don’t let animals be animals anymore,” he says. “It does them a disservice and results in some ignorant kinds of treatment.

“Dogs,” he says, “would be perfectly content eating the same food every day for the rest of their lives. It tastes good, fills them up and never disappoints. A dog’s owner, on the other hand, might say, ‘I would never want the same meal again and again, how boring.’ Then she goes to the store and buys her pup a variety of options, which in turn disrupts the dog’s digestive tract.” But, Sanders insists,”Dogs aren’t like us.”

Similarly, interpreting their behavior as if they were human can lead to false assumptions. Says Sanders, “People might believe the dog peed on their bed because she was angry that they were gone, but what if the dog has a urinary tract infection? It’s an inappropriate way of understanding their behavior.”

But why are we so crazy about our pets? NYU sociologist Colin Jerolmack, quoted above, has an answer…

Why have they become so important to us? NYU’s Jerolmack speculates that it may be due to people’s decreasing connection to each other. In an era of online social networks, long work hours and distances between families, we have far fewer strong social ties and many more weak ties, he says. “We’re spending a lot more time alone or with our immediate family. The companionship of pets has become much more valuable today.”

Furthermore, relationships with pets are much less emotionally messy. They love you no matter what you look like or if your breath stinks. And they show affection consistently. Pets have become a relatively easy and loveable replacement of children or a strong community, which, Jerolmack warns, may lead to an impending culture clash.

“In the city, we’re already seeing debates over park space going to kids or dogs,” says Jerolmack. “There will be more people demanding social recognition of pets, wanting to bring their pets everywhere. And with an industry relying on them, I don’t see us going backwards.”

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today ran a story about how ‘flocking’ behavior has now “landed on social networking sites” like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The article integrates commentary from a number of different sociologists on this trend.

USA Today reports:

The interconnected web of our friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances may dominate our lives more than we know.

They’ve always been there, making up our social support systems. But now, largely thanks to the burgeoning popularity of online social networks like Facebook, researchers are discovering what a powerful influence our connections — both online and off — really have over our lives.

“Those of us who study social networks believe they matter — that things do spread along social networks,” says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

Another sociologist adds…

“Social networking sites have brought social networks into people’s consciousness,” says Barry Wellman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who started analyzing social networks in the 1960s and has expanded his studies to online.

The research:

For the most part, being part of a social network is good for you, research suggests. For example, a study in this month’s Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being.

“In many ways, human beings behave like flocks of birds or schools of fish,” says Nicholas Christakis, a physician and Harvard University sociologist who is co-author of a new book,Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, out today.

“So many things we normally think of as individualistic — like what our body size is, or what we think about a political topic, or whether we are happy — are actually collective phenomena,” says Christakis, 47.

Whether they’re face-to-face or virtual, social networks influence human behavior and shape everything from finances to the way people vote, say Christakis and co-author James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California-San Diego.

The authors suggest that the world is governed by what they call “three degrees of influence” — that is, your friend’s friend’s friend, most likely someone you don’t even know — who indirectly influences your actions and emotions.

For example, when a friend starts exercising more, “I change my mind about how much I should be exercising or I share stories with my other friends who are influenced to do the same. You either change your behavior or you transmit information about the behavior to others, who change their behavior,” says Fowler, 39.

Read more…

Although published earlier this month, the Crawler recently picked up a story about sociologist Liz Cullen’s study of Twitter and how one might define the ‘sociology of Twitter.’

ReadWriteWeb, which posted the story and the video below, reports:

Sociologist and ethnographer, Liz Pullen, spent a month tracking the top 500 Twitter users (as ranked by number of followers) as well as the much-contested suggested users list. In tracking these accounts, she also closely analyzed the behaviors of new adopters and their expectations of the service. Perhaps her conclusions will help us all understand – and hopefully improve – the dismal attrition rates for the service.

View the video…

The Sociology of Twitter, Video Interview with Liz Pullen from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Read more from ReadWriteWeb.

Science Daily (a press release service) brought a new study by sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst to the attention of the Crawler today, which examines how “the context in which we meet people influences our social network. One of his conclusions: you lose about half of your close network members every seven years.”

His research offers several important findings…

Limited in your choices

Mollenhorst investigated, for example, whether the social context in which contacts are made influences the degree of similarity between partners, friends and acquaintances. It was expected that the influence of social contexts on similarity in relationships would be stronger for weak relationships than for strong ones. After all, you are less fussy about your choice of acquaintances than your choice of partner. In relationships with partners, Mollenhorst indeed found more similarity than in relationships with friends. Yet interestingly, the influence of the social context on similarity did not differ between partners, friends and acquaintances. This reveals how strongly opportunities to meet influence the social composition of personal networks.

With his research Mollenhorst has confirmed that personal networks are not formed solely on the basis of personal choices. These choices are limited by opportunities to meet. Another strong indication for this came from the fact that people often choose friends from a context in which they have previously chosen a friend. Moreover, the extent to which our friends know each other strongly depends on the context in which people meet each other.

Individualism

Many sociologists assume that our society is becoming increasingly individualistic. For example, it is held that we strictly separate work, clubs and friends. Mollenhorst established, however, that public contexts such as work or the neighbourhood and private contexts frequently overlap each other.

Furthermore, Mollenhorst’s research reveals that networks are not shrinking, whereas American research reveals such a decline. Over a period of seven years the average size of personal networks was found to be strikingly stable. However, during the course of seven years we replace many members of our network with other people. Only thirty percent of the discussion partners and practical helpers still held the same position seven years later. Only 48 percent were still part of the network. Therefore value the friends you have. As long as you have them that is.

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This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review highlighted a compelling new book from sociologist William Julius Wilson entitled, ‘More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.’ 

The Times writes:

In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.

The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).

And today…

Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.

Read more.

At the end of last week, the Economist ran a story entitled, “Primates on Facebook,” about the capability of humans to maintain social networks via websites such as facebook. The answer it seems, is that we are quite limited…

The Economist reports:

That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other tidbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

But the Economist wouldn’t write a story like this without calling in the sociologists…

…Moreover, sociologists also distinguish between a person’s wider network, as described by the Dunbar number or something similar, and his social “core”. Peter Marsden, of Harvard University, found that Americans, even if they socialise a lot, tend to have only a handful of individuals with whom they “can discuss important matters”. A subsequent study found, to widespread concern, that this number is on a downward trend.

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

I’m left wanting to know more about this supposed ‘in-house sociologist’ Facebook is keeping on call…

Read more.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about how kids these days aren’t into planning in advance – attributing this ‘new’ phenomenon to the rise of mobile communications via text messaging and web-based chat. The Inquirer reports:

The ubiquity of cell phones and text messaging, especially among young people, has changed the whole idea of the word plans – most significantly, it allows people not to make any.

“One of the consequences of the mobile phone is that you can postpone any decision until the last minute,” said James E. Katz, chair of the Rutgers University communications department, where he directs the Center for Mobile Communications Studies. “Since you have up to that last minute to obtain information for the decision, cell phones can give you the opportunity to delay it. What do you want for dinner? Hmmm, I’ll tell you when I am really hungry.”

But a sociologist isn’t so sure that this is a new trend…

Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers-Camden, is not nearly as worried, saying that the late-planning habit, especially for young people, started at least a generation ago, or even before, with the countercultural 1960s and ’70s.

“There was a value of being spontaneous and free of entanglements,” said Goertzel, 66, whose own children, now 43 and 39, weren’t big on making long-term plans when they were younger. In comparison, when he and his wife were younger, she had to know Tuesday what they were doing Saturday.

“Even with wired telephones, there was a lot of last-minute communication,” he said. “It might also be cyclical, a matter of generational culture, an ‘uptight’ generation followed by a ‘laid-back’ one.”

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An article on technology and sociological research recently came across the Crawler’s radar, originally published in the New York Times. The story describes how nearly 100 students living in Random Hall (an on-campus dormitory) at MIT have traded in their personal privacy for free smartphones used to study their movements. The smartphones generate information beamed to a central computer, including individual actions, to map the dorm’s social network. The Times writes: “The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.”

About the researcher…

Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects…

Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.

Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.

Once based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.

Read more.

The Washington Post reports on how the idea of America as an ‘ideological melting pot’ – in the context of the progress marked by the inauguration of our 44th President – may not be entirely true. This article highlights how researchers find that people want to live in diverse communities, but clump together with those most like them…

“Americans tell survey researchers they prefer to live in diverse communities, but this country’s residential patterns suggest otherwise,” said Paul Taylor, who directs the Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends Project. The question is why.

“Do some people gravitate toward communities so they can be among neighbors who share their political views?” Taylor and his colleague Richard Morin asked in a recent report. “Alternatively, does living in a politically homogeneous community diminish people’s appetite for diversity?”

And sociologists?

Sociologists have a term for this birds-of-a-feather-flocking-together phenomenon: Homophily. Some explanations for America’s political homophily suggest that a president who is determined to be a uniter might be able to help the nation reverse course; other theories suggest that the forces of polarization are beyond the powers of any individual to influence.

Sociologist Michael W. Macy at Cornell University argues that political homophily is largely the result of network dynamics: Neighborhoods coalesce around certain viewpoints because people don’t want to feel at odds with those around them. As views in a neighborhood become more homogenous, outliers feel like outcasts. They move if an opportunity arises, leaving their old neighborhood less politically diverse.

Read more.