Seeing things clearly: social structure,personality, and accuracy in social network perception

People differ in their ability to perceive accurately the informal patterns of interpersonal relationships in their social groups, i.e., the group's network structure. Existing research leaves us largely unable to explain the variation in accuracy in social network perception. This paper argues that the study of accuracy in social network perception should consider the effect of both situational factors and individual differences. To explore this claim, three research centers in an Italian university were studied. Perceptions of the friendship and the work-related advice networks in the organization were compared to the actual network. The results indicate that both an observer's position in the formal and informal social structure of the organization, and his or her personality traits contribute to determining accuracy in social network perception.     

Cognitive inconsistencies and non-symmetric friendship

Non-reciprocated relationships, such as all workers knowing the president of the company but only a few of the workers being known by the president, and non-symmetric relationships, such as workers thinking that they know the president and thinking that the president does not know them, are endemic to most social situations. While such inconsistencies may be expected in relationships such as giving advice and lending money, they are rarely expected to occur in seemingly symmetric relationships such as friendship. Nevertheless, they do. We suggest that research in this area has been hampered by the confused language used for describing ‘symmetries’ and ‘non-symmetries’. We present a framework for thinking about these relations that clearly distinguishes cognitive inconsistencies and non-symmetric and non-reciprocated relations. Then, we employ this framework and constructural theory to suggest that owing to cognitive inconsistencies, any interaction-based relationship, including friendship, can potentially be non-symmetric. We examine a series of hypotheses concerning interaction and interaction-based behaviors that derive from this theory using friendship relations. We find that we are able to predict both who is friends with whom, non-symmetry in friendship, and non-reciprocities in the expectation for and recall of friendship.     

The Effects of Ethnic Minority Adolescents' Ethnic Self‐Identification on Friendship Selection

This study investigated the effects of ethnic minority adolescents' ethnic self‐identification (host country, dual, or heritage country) on friendship choices among ethnic majority and minority peers. Hypotheses were derived from similarity–attraction and social identity theory and tested using longitudinal social network data from 1,004 middle school students (five schools) in Germany. Results showed that ethnic minority adolescents' ethnic self‐identification affected friendship selection beyond ethnic homophily. While host country and dual identification was beneficial with respect to friendships with both ethnic majority and minority peers, heritage country identification was detrimental to relations with both of them.     

Sources and Implications of Maternal Accuracy About Young Adolescents’ Vulnerability to Friendship Jealousy

To assist effectively with social difficulties, parents must accurately understand the peer situations that are difficult for their child. Mothers’ insight into their young adolescent's vulnerability to friendship jealousy was assessed by posing identical vignettes to 72 young adolescents and their mothers and matching their responses. Mothers and children also completed questionnaires on their relationship and the child's adjustment. Mothers as a group were poor judges of their child's jealousy, but considerable variability existed. Accuracy was greater when mother–child pairs were closer. Polynomial regression and response surface analyses indicated that maternal accuracy could dampen the friendship and aggression risks otherwise associated with being vulnerable to jealousy.     

Adding valued data to social network measures: Does it add to associations with adolescent substance use?

This research examines whether adding information about adolescent friendships (feeling of closeness to friend, visits to friend's home, interaction outside school, and parent involvement in the friendship) to social network measures increases associations with adolescent substance use. In 2002, friendship nominations were obtained from more than 4700 students in grades 6 to 8 in 13 schools. Social network measures weighted and unweighted for the valued information were created from those data and compared. The findings suggest that, although non-valued network measures and ego substance use were associated, the valued network measures did not add to those associations.     

Where do intra-organizational advice relations come from? The role of informal status and social capital in social exchange

Social status and social capital frameworks are used to derive competing hypotheses about the emergence and structure of advice relations in organizations. Although both approaches build on a social exchange framework, they differ in their behavioral micro-foundations. From a status perspective, advice giving is a means to generate prestige, whereas asking advice decreases one's relative standing. At a structural level these motivations are expected to result in an overrepresentation of non-reciprocal dyads and non-cyclical triadic structures in the advice network, as well as in active advice seekers being unlikely to be approached for advice, especially by active advice givers. From a social capital perspective, advice seeking creates obligations for the advice seeker. At the structural level, this results in an overrepresentation of reciprocal dyads and cyclical triads, and active advice seekers to be unpopular as targets of advice seeking, especially for active advice givers. Analyses of four waves of a longitudinal sociometric study of 57 employees of a Dutch Housing Corporation provide partial support for both approaches. In line with the social capital perspective, we find reciprocal advice relations to be overrepresented at the dyad level. Results at the triad level support the social status arguments, according to which high status individuals will avoid asking advice from low status individuals. The implications for macro-structural properties of intra-organizational advice network are discussed.     

‘Self’ (ziji), ‘others’ (taren) and ‘collective’ (jiti): Friendships at school embedded with China's Confucian–collectivist sociocultural values

Friendship, an important type of interpersonal relationship, has been studied in various disciplines. When studying friendship, sociologists highlight the importance of placing friendships in context to build up a connection between friendship, a type of interpersonal relationship between individuals, and the surrounding social and cultural environment. In sociological studies of friendship, children's friendships in the Chinese context have not been explored thoroughly. To contribute to closing this gap, this article places children's peer friendships in a rural Chinese primary boarding school context and focuses on exploring Chinese Confucian – collectivist sociocultural values that emerged in these children's daily practices of peer friendships.     

Individuals’ power and their social network accuracy: A situated cognition perspective

Individuals differ in how accurately they perceive their social environment, but research and theory provide conflicting predictions on whether powerful people are more or less accurate than others. Drawing on social network theory and the situated cognition theory of power, we examine the relationship between individuals’ formal and informal power and their perceptual accuracy of social network relationships. We propose that individuals’ perceptual accuracy is related to: 1) their formal and informal power in the organization; 2) the type of relationship being perceived (positive/negative valence) and its relevance to task and goal completion; and 3) the dependence relationship with the target of perception (i.e., whether the perceiver is dependent on the perceived to get their work done). Predictions were tested using cognitive social structure data collected from a technical call center. Results showed that power was generally linked to increased perceptual accuracy, particularly for the types of relationships most relevant for task and goal completion. We further demonstrated that social network accuracy was related to employees’ outcomes, including subsequent transfer, promotion, and exit from the organization.     

Preadolescent Clique Stratification and the Hierarchy of Identity*

This article focuses on one of the most critical features of elementary school students' social lives: their peer friendship groups. Within each grade, and separated by gender, a hierarchy of friendship groups is stratified according to the dimension of status and popularity. This ranges from the popular clique at the top, to the wannabes who hang around the popular people's periphery seeking access, to the individuals forming smaller middle-level friendship circles, to the social isolates at the bottom. Membership at each of these ranks carries with it a distinct experience in terms of power and domination, intra-group stratification, type of leadership, and friendship relations, leading to a further stratification by group into a hierarchy of identity. We conclude by examining the basis for preadolescents' identity formation, augmenting previous models of identity and social position that rely exclusively on status with the addition of interactional and relational factors. This structural-relational model bridges the structural and processual symbolic interactionist models of identity, linking them at a Simmelian level of analysis.     

Friendship and Alcohol Use in Early Adolescence: A Multilevel Social Network Approach

This study applies multilevel social network analytic techniques to examine processes of homophilic selection and social influence related to alcohol use among friends in early adolescence. Participants included 3,041 Dutch youth (M age =12 years, 49% female) from 120 classrooms in 14 schools. Three waves with 3‐month intervals of friendship nomination data and self‐reports of drinking behavior were collected. Results revealed that within classrooms, friendship nominations tended to be reciprocated and dyadic friendships tended to be embedded within cohesive subgroups (e.g., cliques). Students tended to nominate friends who were the same sex, from a similar ethnic background, and who they previously knew from primary school. Selection processes turned out to play a more significant role than social influence processes in predicting similarity between early adolescent friends' alcohol use. Although friendship dynamics and individual drinking trajectories substantially differed between classrooms, the effects of homophilic selection and social influence did not.     

Social Cognitive Theory and the Career Development of African American Women

No comprehensive model of the career development of racial and ethnic minorities has yet been developed; even less attention has been devoted to models of the career development of racial and ethnic minority women. One of the more promising career theories that may prove satisfactory in accounting for ethnicity in career development is Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory (Lent & Brown, 1996; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). In this article, the authors selectively review the literature on African American women's career development to clarify how social cognitive mechanisms may be operating. The primary focus of this conceptual analysis is on the central elements of social cognitive theory, namely, self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Implications for counseling are presented.     

The co-evolution of gossip and friendship in workplace social networks

This study investigates the co-evolution of friendship and gossip in organizations. Two contradicting perspectives are tested. The social capital perspective predicts that friendship causes gossip between employees, defined as informal evaluative talking about absent colleagues. The evolutionary perspective reverses this causality claiming that gossiping facilitates friendship. The data comprises of three observations of a complete organizational network, allowing longitudinal social network analyses. Gossip and friendship are modeled as both explanatory and outcome networks with RSiena. Results support the evolutionary perspective in that gossip between two individuals increases the likelihood of their future friendship formation. However, individuals with disproportionately high gossip activity have fewer friends in the network, suggesting that the use of gossiping to attract friends has a limit.     

Does proximity matter? Distance dependence of adolescent friendships

Geographic proximity is a determinant factor of friendship. Friendship datasets that include detailed geographic information are scarce, and when this information is available, the dependence of friendship on distance is often modelled by pre-specified parametric functions or derived from theory without further empirical assessment. This paper aims to give a detailed representation of the association between distance and the likelihood of friendship existence and friendship dynamics, and how this is modified by a few basic social and individual factors. The data employed is a three-wave network of 336 adolescents living in a small Swedish town, for whom information has been collected on their household locations. The analysis is a three-step process that combines (1) nonparametric logistic regressions to unravel the overall functional form of the dependence of friendship on distance, without assuming it has a particular strength or shape; (2) parametric logistic regressions to construct suitable transformations of distance that can be employed in (3) stochastic models for longitudinal network data, to assess how distance, individual covariates, and network structure shape adolescent friendship dynamics. It was found that the log-odds of friendship existence and friendship dynamics decrease smoothly with the logarithm of distance. For adolescents in different schools the dependence is linear, and stronger than for adolescents in the same school. Living nearby accounts, in this dataset, for an aspect of friendship dynamics that is not explicitly modelled by network structure or by individual covariates. In particular, the estimated distance effect is not correlated with reciprocity or transitivity effects.     

Feedback Loops in Clinical Practice: An Integrative Framework

Practical concepts and interventions for counsellors and their clients are presented based on Maruyama's concept of feedback. Elements of psychodynamic theory, Weinberg's theory and Moreno's role theory are reformulated in terms of feedback. The concept of feedback also links network theory and chaos theory; cognitive challenges and psychodynamic interpretation. This forms an integrative framework for understanding human functioning. Human functioning emerges from the interaction of innumerable intrapersonal and interpersonal feedback loops. The feedback loops organise a network of actions, ideas and feelings, and a network of roles. Some feedback loops tend to intensify life difficulties, while others tend to resolve these difficulties. The counselling interventions evolved from problem‐gambling counselling practice, and sample interventions are provided based on a composite problem gambler.     

Social capital, networks and leisure consumption

This article reflects on the way in which personal ties affect the nature and content of consumption. While it is banal to observe that friends, kin, colleagues and neighbours influence anyone's pattern of consumption, comparatively little work exists on how this process operates. The article will be illustrated by some secondary analysis of the British Household Panel Survey which has a panel of approximately 10,000 people who have been interviewed annually since 1991. It analyses aspects of individual consumption in relation to people's associational involvement and friendship ties. The data is explored in the context of debates about social capital, attempting to apply the concept in order to analyse recreational practices. It is suggested that social capital is a flawed concept and that greater appreciation of the complexity and diversity of network ties is required to understand how personal connections influence consumption.     

Early Brain Development for Social Work Practice: Integrating Neuroscience with Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Despite social work's claim of a bio-psychosocial approach to human behavior and development, the profession fails to incorporate important physiological knowledge into practice, research, and education. This article provides an example of the usefulness of understanding the ontology of early brain development by demonstrating how such knowledge can be integrated into Piaget's theory of cognitive development. We suggest that social work's focus on evidence-based practice demands the incorporation of neuroscience into the profession's body of knowledge.     

Interethnic Relationships: The Role of Social Network Diversity

We examine the degree to which ethnic diversity in social networks relates to the frequency of interethnic romantic relationships for 318 college students. In a multinomial logit, we find that the odds of having an interethnic relationship once or twice, versus never, increase significantly if the respondent has a relatively ethnically diverse friendship network, is male, and supports interethnic dating. The odds of having an interethnic relationship often, versus once or twice, are significantly higher for persons of color and when the friends of the respondent's parents are relatively diverse ethnically. Findings from open‐ended data also provide support for a social network perspective, and point to the processes by which networks, gender, and ethnicity shape interethnic courtship.     

Role-Taking Accuracy in Medical Encounters: A Test of two Theories

Abstract

This paper tests five hypotheses derived from two contrasting theoretical perspectives on role-taking accuracy: a social contact theory and an institutional resource theory. We investigate how well doctors and patients perceive one another's perspectives in a medical encounter. The cumulative weight of the data supports the proposed social contact theory. Increased contact between residents and patients, as reflected in physician's year in residency, contributes to more accurate role-taking on the part of physicians. Conditions of social compatibility between doctors and patients vis a vis gender or race lead to more accurate role-taking. Finally, personal characteristics are better predictors of role-taking accuracy than institutional status variables such as type of residency training program or doctor's year in residency status.