We used in-depth interviews with 101 participants in the East York section of Toronto, Canada to understand how digital media affects social connectivity in general—and networked individualism in particular—for people at different stages of the life course. Although people of all ages intertwined their use of digital media with their face-to-face interactions, younger adults used more types of digital media and have more diversified personal networks. People in different age-groups conserved media, tending to stick with the digital media they learned to use in earlier life stages. Approximately one-third of the participants were Networked Individuals: In each age-group, they were the most actively using digital media to maintain ties and to develop new ones. Another one-third were Socially Bounded, who often actively used digital media but kept their connectivity within a smaller set of social groups. The remaining one-third, who were Socially Limited, were the least likely to use digital media. Younger adults were the most likely to be Networked Individuals, leading us to wonder if the percentage of the population who are Bounded or Limited will decline over time.

This study examines changes in individual social capital during adult life within a 19-year period. Social capital theory and life course theory are combined, and it is argued that changes in social networks do not necessarily go together with changes in social capital: while personal networks are known to decline in size with age, social capital can be expected to accumulate, in particular for those who had a better starting position and therefore more resources to share. Panel data from the survey of the social networks of the Dutch (SSND) (1999–2018) at four points of measurement are employed to inquire into this argument. Social capital is measured by the position generator instrument, and three indicators, that is, resource extensity, mean prestige access, and resource range are analyzed. Results of fixed effect models show that, on average, people maintain access to social capital, and that men and higher educated gain social capital through their life as opposed to women and lower educated. Implications for the understanding of the reproduction of social inequality are discussed. The paper concludes with a reflection upon the value of ego-centered network analysis in the era of big data and data science.

This study documents historical trends of size and political diversity in Americans’ discussion networks, which are often seen as important barometers of social and political health. Contrasting findings from data drawn out of a nationally representative survey experiment of 1,055 Americans during the contentious 2016 U.S. presidential election to data arising from 11 national data sets covering nearly three decades, we find that Americans’ core networks are significantly smaller and more politically homogeneous than at any other period. Several methodological artifacts seem unlikely to account for the effect. We show that in this period, more than before, “important matters” were often framed as political matters, and that this association probably accounts for the smaller networks.

Ego networks are thought to be influenced by the opportunities provided to associate with others given by our master statuses (e.g., race or sex), by the preferences individuals possess for interaction given our personality traits (e.g., extroverted or neurotic), and by the capacity to manage interactions on an ongoing basis given our cognitive ability to recall network information. However, prior research has been unable to examine all three classes of predictors concurrently. We rectify this deficiency in the literature by using a novel dataset of nearly 1000 respondents collected using controlled laboratory designs; using this dataset, we can simultaneously examine the impact of master statuses, personality traits, and social cognitive competencies on ego network size, structure (i.e., density), and composition (i.e., diversity). We find that all classes of predictors influence our ego networks, though in different ways, and point to new avenues for research into human sociability.

This paper investigates the processes involved when newly hired employees need to simultaneously build up and mobilize personal network ties during their organizational socialization. It focuses on the quality of ties at an early formative stage, characterized by the lack of a tie history between actors. Social capital theory would suggest that such nascent ties do not offer optimal channels for the kind and volume of resources that newcomers (need to) rely on during socialization. To better understand how this apparent mismatch between tie quality and resource needs is handled from an ego-centered perspective, the paper analyzes personal network data from 24 newcomers in nine organizations, using an adapted form of Qualitative Structural Analysis. Three tie-level qualities are found to explain how the lack of tie history may be alleviated, circumvented, or compensated. They comprise (a) variants of openness experienced with stronger ties, (b) perceptions of a lowered threshold towards weaker ties, and (c) sources of legitimacy regarding latent ties. Based on these findings, the paper presents an integrated conceptual model to clarify how nascent ties offer channels for network resources during socialization and discusses the need for further research on the role of specific moderators for the investigated processes.

A person’s egonet, the set of others with whom that person is connected, is a personal sample of society which especially influences that person’s experience and perceptions of society. We show that egonets systematically misrepresent the general population because each person is included in as many egonets as that person has “friends.” Previous research has recognized that this unequal weighting in egonets leads many people to find that their friends have more friends than they themselves have. This paper builds upon that research to show that people’s egonets provide them with systematically biased samples of the population more generally. We discuss how this ubiquitous egonet bias may have far reaching implications for people’s experiences and perceptions of frequencies of other people’s ties and traits in ways that may influence their own feelings and behaviors. In particular, these egonet biases may help explain people’s tendencies to disproportionately experience and overestimate the prevalence of certain types of deviance and other social behaviors and consequently be influenced toward them. We illustrate egonet bias with analyses of all friends among 63,731 Facebook users. We call for further empirical investigation of egonet biases and their consequences for individuals and society.

While network research often focuses on social integration as a predictor of health, a less-explored idea is that connections to dissimilar others may benefit well-being. As such, this study investigates whether network diversity is associated with changes in four health outcomes over a 3-year period of time in the U.S.A. Specifically, we focus on how an underexplored measure of network diversity—educational attainment assortativity—is associated with common self-reported outcomes: propensity to exercise, body-mass index, mental health, and physical health. We extend prior research by conducting multilevel analyses using this measure of diversity while adjusting for a range of socio-demographic and network confounders. Data are drawn from a longitudinal probability sample of U.S. adults (n=10.679) in which respondents reported information about themselves and eight possible alters during three yearly surveys (2013–2015). We find, first, that higher educational attainment is associated with more educationally insular networks, while less-educated adults have more educationally diverse networks. Results further suggest that having educationally similar networks is associated with higher body-mass index among the less educated. Further exploration of the relationship between ego network diversity, tie strength, and health is warranted.

Who is more likely to be isolated from society in terms of political beliefs? To answer this question, we measure whether individuals’ beliefs are “out of sync”—the extent to which their views differ with their contemporaries—and examine how the level of synchronization is associated with the size of important-matter and political-matter discussion networks. The results show that people with weaker belief synchronization are more likely to have smaller important-matter discussion networks. However, additional analyses of political-matter discussion networks show that weaker belief synchronization is associated with smaller networks only among those without a high school diploma and even provides some advantage in maintaining larger networks for the college-educated. Overall, the results imply that political beliefs that are “out of sync” correspond to the individual being “out of society,” whereas the aspects of “out of society” are quite different among educational groups.