{"id":279,"date":"2008-09-30T07:54:27","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T13:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=279"},"modified":"2008-09-30T07:54:27","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T13:54:27","slug":"doubts-about-a-social-networks-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2008\/09\/30\/doubts-about-a-social-networks-study\/","title":{"rendered":"doubts about a social networks study"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"solitary<\/a>The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a> reports this morning on an ongoing debate as to the validity of a 2006 study which concluded that Americans have become significantly more socially isolated over the last 25 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

David Glenn reports, “In the summer of 2006, several major news outlets<\/em>gave prominent coverage to a sociological study with a grim message: Americans\u2019 social isolation had increased radically since the 1980s. Whereas in 1985 Americans reported that, on average, they had 2.94 friends or family members with whom they could discuss important matters, by 2004 that number had dropped to 2.08. A quarter of Americans had no close confidants at all.\u00a0Those findings were …[even] startling to the study\u2019s authors, who are sociologists at Cornell University, Duke University, and the University of Arizona, [J. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears].”<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley sociologist and social networks scholar Claude Fisher has some concerns:<\/p>\n

The [previous] study’s portrait of collapsing social networks, Mr. Fischer writes, is at odds with other recent findings by social scientists. What\u2019s more, he says, some of the 2006 paper’s data seem internally inconsistent or simply implausible. For example, among people who reported belonging to four or more organizations\u2014presumably a highly sociable bunch\u201414.9 percent reported having no confidants. And what about married people? Surely they discuss important matters with their spouses, if no one else. In 1985 only 6.6 percent of married respondents reported having no confidants, but in 2004, 22.2 percent did so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fisher claims that such errors could be due to errors during data collection or coding. Now the original study’s authors have responded…<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

Ms. Smith-Lovin said that she and her co-authors are proposing an experiment for a future administration of the General Social Survey\u2014perhaps in 2010\u2014in which the social-network questions would be offered at different points during the survey, to see whether such \u201ccontext effects\u201d actually make a difference.\u00a0She and her colleagues have also re-interviewed many of the people who responded to the 2004 survey, but she said that they are not yet ready to discuss those findings. Even if some of those people have no intimate friends, they can apparently count on having a long conversation with a social scientist every two years or so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Full story.<\/a><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning on an ongoing debate as to the validity of a 2006 study which concluded that Americans have become significantly more socially isolated over the last 25 years.\u00a0 David Glenn reports, “In the summer of 2006, several major news outletsgave prominent coverage to a sociological study with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39112,38,116,161],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-culture","tag-methods","tag-networks","tag-social"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}