Family Formation and Close Social Ties Within Religious Congregations

The study of family and religion has yet to elaborate on the social ties that connect these two important and changing institutions. Specifically, how does family formation (i.e., marriage and childrearing) impact social ties to religious communities? Using longitudinal data from the Portraits of American Life Study (2006–2012) and fixed effects regression models that control for time‐stable heterogeneity (N = 1,314), this study tests the effects of marriage and childrearing on changes in close congregational social ties. Fixed effects estimates suggest that marriage actually decreases close social ties to religious congregations, whereas rearing children within marital unions increases them. Thus, it is children, not marriage per se, that actually integrates married couples into religious communities. These contrasting effects tend to be the strongest among young adults, but they weaken with age as well as marital duration.     

Impact of support networks for breastfeeding: A multicentre study

Background

The rates of breastfeeding worldwide are slowly improving since 1996. Europe is still trailing behind the global breastfeeding incidence and prevalence rates. Thus, breastfeeding promotion, protection, prolongation and support have become an important challenge as breastfeeding sharply decreases in the first six months of life.

社交网络、投资者关注与股价同步性

随着以微博、微信为代表的社交网络信息平台在中国的崛起,形成了新媒体时代下信息资讯生成与扩散的完整传播链条,深刻地影响着金融市场参与主体的学习认知习惯、投资决策理念、交易行为模式,最终影响不同金融资产的价格波动规律． 本文在新媒体时代情景下,以社交网络信息披露与传播平台为切入点,基于信息关注度、信赖度、更新频率等三层维度,构建社交网络微博信息质量指标体系,研究社交网络信息质量与股价同步性的内在关联关系． 研究表明: 微博信息质量与股价同步性有着显著的高度负向线性关联性,并且呈现出非线性 U 型关系． 即随着社交网络信息质量水平的提升,股价同步性逐渐降低到达最小值,而后又逐渐提高． 研究结论为证明上市公司社交网络微博平台对股价同步性有较强影响力,提供了中国金融市场的证据．     

Survival and integration: Kachin social networks and refugee management regimes in Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles

How do refugees establish social networks and mobilise social capital in different contexts throughout a multi-stage migration process? Migrant social network literature explains how migrants accumulate social capital and mobilise resources in and between origin and destination but provides limited answers regarding how these processes unfold during refugee migrations involving protracted stays in intermediate locations and direct interaction with state agents. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Kachin refugees in Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles, I address these gaps by comparing refugee social networks in two sites of a migration process. Distinguishing between networks of survival and networks of integration, I argue that differences in their form and functions stem from their interactions with local refugee management regimes, which are shaped by broader state regulatory contexts. In both locations, these networks and regimes feed off each other to manage the refugee migration process, with key roles played by hybrid institutions rooted in grassroots adaptation efforts yet linked to formal resettlement mechanisms. Considering the refugee migration process as a whole, I show that Kachin refugees demonstrate their possession of social capital gained during the informal social process of migration to advance through institutionalised political processes of resettlement in each context.     

Disaster response on September 11, 2001 through the lens of statistical network analysis

The rescue and relief operations triggered by the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City demanded collaboration among hundreds of organisations. To shed light on the response to the September 11, 2001 attacks and help to plan and prepare the response to future disasters, we study the inter-organisational network that emerged in response to the attacks. Studying the inter-organisational network can help to shed light on (1) whether some organisations dominated the inter-organisational network and facilitated communication and coordination of the disaster response; (2) whether the dominating organisations were supposed to coordinate disaster response or emerged as coordinators in the wake of the disaster; and (3) the degree of network redundancy and sensitivity of the inter-organisational network to disturbances following the initial disaster. We introduce a Bayesian framework which can answer the substantive questions of interest while being as simple and parsimonious as possible. The framework allows organisations to have varying propensities to collaborate, while taking covariates into account, and allows to assess whether the inter-organisational network had network redundancy—in the form of transitivity—by using a test which may be regarded as a Bayesian score test. We discuss implications in terms of disaster management.     

Norms,status and the dynamics of advice networks: A case study

The issue of the influence of norms on behavior is as old as sociology itself. This paper explores the effect of normative homophily (i.e. “sharing the same normative choices”) on the evolution of the advice network among lay judges in a courthouse. 0020 and 0025 social exchange theory suggests that members select advisors based on the status of the advisor. Additional research shows that members of an organization use similarities with others in ascribed, achieved or inherited characteristics, as well as other kinds of ties, to mitigate the potentially negative effects of this strong status rule. We elaborate and test these theories using data on advisor choice in the Commercial Court of Paris. We use a jurisprudential case about unfair competition (material and “moral” damages), a case that we submitted to all the judges of this court, to test the effect of normative homophily on the selection of advisors, controlling for status effects. Normative homophily is measured by the extent to which two judges are equally “punitive” in awarding damages to plaintiffs. Statistical analyses combine longitudinal advice network data collected among the judges with their normative dispositions. Contrary to what could be expected from conventional sociological theories, we find no pure effect of normative homophily on the choice of advisors. In this case, therefore, sharing the same norms and values does not have, by itself, a mitigating effect and does not contribute to the evolution of the network. We argue that status effects, conformity and alignments on positions of opinion leaders in controversies still provide the best insights into the relationship between norms, structure and behavior.     

Bridging and Bonding in the Academic Melting Pot: Cultural Resources and Network Diversity

Understanding how cultural resources shape the formation of social networks is a methodological challenge as well as a theoretical objective, and both are yet to be met. In this study, sociability on college campuses is modeled as a process in which students’ prior cultural experiences and the current social structure of the student body work together, affecting the likelihood of friendships that take place within or across racial boundaries. Structural and cultural perspectives are surveyed to develop hypotheses concerning the determinants of interracial friendship, and these hypotheses are tested against a sample of 3,392 students from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen. The results suggest that religiosity, political activism, high arts participation, and athletic activities undertaken prior to college affect the diversity of social networks formed in the first year, but work in different directions. The effects of these cultural experiences may be explained by the racial organization of cultural activity on campus.     

Entering into,staying, and being active in a group of football supporters: a procedural analysis of engagement. The case of supporters of a French football club

In football (or soccer) stadiums, one of the ends (virages in French, or curve in Italian) brings together the most organized and ardent fans who support their team manu et voce. This article aims to define the dynamics leading individuals to become a part of a group of supporters, an engagement conceived of according to a sequential process. Through a qualitative inquiry, results show the importance of the relational networks in the process of engagement in this type of organization. Moreover, friendly interaction and the levels of sociability encountered over the course of action as part of supporting make up as much incentive to activism as may be understood in the condition of being set back in the general framework of the supporters' careers. The article ends with a discussion on the use of the sociology of collective action and mobilization in order to study the world of football supporters.     

Who “Fills in” for Siblings and How? A Multilevel Analysis of Personal Network Composition and Its Relationship to Sibling Size1

In the midst of widespread fertility decline, I examine the relationship between sibling number and support network composition using multilevel regression on data from 25 countries. A fundamental structural effect of having fewer siblings is that individuals have a smaller pool of available close‐kin alters with whom to construct support networks. Consequently, networks of people with fewer siblings should be composed of different sorts of relations. Results confirm that such compositional adjustment occurs in systematic ways. Compared to those with three or more siblings, adults with none to two siblings (as separate categories) are more likely to expect support from parents, extended kin, and close friends but not more likely to do so from spouses/partners and children. Single children are also more likely to include neighbors and have smaller‐sized and/or impersonal networks. These findings contradict the primacy of familial ties in social support networks. Moreover, adjustment of support networks towards nonsibling ties occurs in culturally expected ways. Those with fewer siblings are generally only more likely to turn to ties for the types of support typically associated with those relations—parents for instrumental and financial support and friends for emotional support. Single children, however, also violate institutionalized expectations of social support by turning to ties for a wider range of social support. The results suggest that continuing declines in fertility could bring about both reinforcement and rearticulation of the sociocultural framing of close personal relationships. Moreover, consistent with recent research, the results show that personal networks are influenced more by individual‐level than country‐level factors.     

Gender identity and lexical variation in social media

We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we argue for a more nuanced approach. By clustering Twitter users, we find a natural decomposition of the dataset into various styles and topical interests. Many clusters have strong gender orientations, but their use of linguistic resources sometimes directly conflicts with the population‐level language statistics. We view these clusters as a more accurate reflection of the multifaceted nature of gendered language styles. Previous corpus‐based work has also had little to say about individuals whose linguistic styles defy population‐level gender patterns. To identify such individuals, we train a statistical classifier, and measure the classifier confidence for each individual in the dataset. Examining individuals whose language does not match the classifier's model for their gender, we find that they have social networks that include significantly fewer same‐gender social connections and that, in general, social network homophily is correlated with the use of same‐gender language markers. Pairing computational methods and social theory thus offers a new perspective on how gender emerges as individuals position themselves relative to audiences, topics, and mainstream gender norms.