Pub Date : 2025-09-17DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.003
Shira Offer , Claude S. Fischer , Keunbok Lee
Egocentric networks are dynamic. Prior research has typically measured change in broad network characteristics or simply in membership turnover but given relatively little attention to the history of alter-ego relationships. Using rich information about alters over three waves in the UCNets study, we develop a novel approach that delineates a “trajectory” over time for each of the alters in the network and then uses all these observed trajectories to identify types of ego networks. Results from Multilevel Latent Growth Models reveal six distinct trajectories for alters: continuously active, awakened, dormant, dropped, transitory, and new. The distribution of those six trajectories coalesces at the ego-level into three network types – anchored, shifting, and regenerative – each with unique dynamics and compositional features. To illustrate the contribution of this approach, we examine the associations between life events and the three types of network dynamics among UCNets' young adults. Findings reveal subtle patterns of change: some events shape networks by reinforcing their cores, while others expand or reconfigure networks’ near and distant peripheries.
{"title":"The gears in network dynamics: The alter-trajectory approach","authors":"Shira Offer , Claude S. Fischer , Keunbok Lee","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Egocentric networks are dynamic. Prior research has typically measured change in broad network characteristics or simply in membership turnover but given relatively little attention to the history of alter-ego relationships. Using rich information about alters over three waves in the UCNets study, we develop a novel approach that delineates a “trajectory” over time for each of the alters in the network and then uses all these observed trajectories to identify types of ego networks. Results from Multilevel Latent Growth Models reveal six distinct trajectories for alters: continuously active, awakened, dormant, dropped, transitory, and new. The distribution of those six trajectories coalesces at the ego-level into three network types – anchored, shifting, and regenerative – each with unique dynamics and compositional features. To illustrate the contribution of this approach, we examine the associations between life events and the three types of network dynamics among UCNets' young adults. Findings reveal subtle patterns of change: some events shape networks by reinforcing their cores, while others expand or reconfigure networks’ near and distant peripheries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 131-146"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145095566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-15DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.09.001
Alessandro Lomi, Philippa E. Pattison
{"title":"Duality: The first fifty years and beyond","authors":"Alessandro Lomi, Philippa E. Pattison","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.09.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.09.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 123-126"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145060458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-12DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.004
David Kretschmer , Lars Leszczensky
Friendship segregation between Muslim and non-Muslim youth in Europe is well documented. However, previous network studies provide only snapshots, thus ignoring whether interreligious friendship-making changes throughout adolescence. A recent non-network study suggests increasing in-group friendships among Muslim girls and stability among Muslim boys, but it could not explain these differences and did not consider interdependence with non-Muslims’ friendship-making. To overcome these limitations, we study the trajectories of friendship-making among Muslim and non-Muslim boys and girls and assess the explanatory power of three key determinants of interreligious friendship-making dynamics: interreligious attitudes, religious norms that constrain out-group friendships, and reactions to friendship-making behavior of other groups. Addressing the methodological limitations of non-network research, we study friendship trajectories with stochastic actor-oriented models for network evolution applied to five waves of longitudinal friendship network data among 1122 Muslim and non-Muslim youth in German schools. We find that Muslim girls start out with at least as many interreligious friends as Muslim boys but that their tendency to have non-Muslim friends decreases substantially throughout adolescence. By contrast, the religious friendship-making of both Muslim boys and non-Muslims of either gender remains stable over time. We show that the increase in in-group friendships only applies to Muslim girls with high religiosity and that it is particularly strong for cross-gender friendships, suggesting that gendered religious norms can explain differences in the dynamics of Muslim boys’ and girls’ friendship-making. By contrast, interreligious attitudes and reactions to shifts in other groups’ friendship-making do not contribute to the observed friendship-making trajectories.
{"title":"Stable or dynamic? Explaining the development of Muslim and non-Muslim boys’ and girls’ friendship-making across adolescence","authors":"David Kretschmer , Lars Leszczensky","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Friendship segregation between Muslim and non-Muslim youth in Europe is well documented. However, previous network studies provide only snapshots, thus ignoring whether interreligious friendship-making changes throughout adolescence. A recent non-network study suggests increasing in-group friendships among Muslim girls and stability among Muslim boys, but it could not explain these differences and did not consider interdependence with non-Muslims’ friendship-making. To overcome these limitations, we study the trajectories of friendship-making among Muslim and non-Muslim boys and girls and assess the explanatory power of three key determinants of interreligious friendship-making dynamics: interreligious attitudes, religious norms that constrain out-group friendships, and reactions to friendship-making behavior of other groups. Addressing the methodological limitations of non-network research, we study friendship trajectories with stochastic actor-oriented models for network evolution applied to five waves of longitudinal friendship network data among 1122 Muslim and non-Muslim youth in German schools. We find that Muslim girls start out with at least as many interreligious friends as Muslim boys but that their tendency to have non-Muslim friends decreases substantially throughout adolescence. By contrast, the religious friendship-making of both Muslim boys and non-Muslims of either gender remains stable over time. We show that the increase in in-group friendships only applies to Muslim girls with high religiosity and that it is particularly strong for cross-gender friendships, suggesting that gendered religious norms can explain differences in the dynamics of Muslim boys’ and girls’ friendship-making. By contrast, interreligious attitudes and reactions to shifts in other groups’ friendship-making do not contribute to the observed friendship-making trajectories.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 110-122"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145046129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-08DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.005
Edgardo Sica , Pasquale Marcello Falcone , Antonio Lopolito
The present paper aims at unravelling the networking dynamics regarding the evolution of an innovation-niche, by looking at its network configuration over time. To this end, we investigate the actors’ role within the network as well as the network architecture. We employ the social network analysis (SNA) to four different but interrelated types of networks characterising the Italian biofuel industry. Each network was investigated in both its development and maturity phase. Our findings show that, over the niche evolution, actors established new relations, increasing networks’ density and making the networks more centralized. Furthermore, while two out of four networks confirmed their small world configuration over time, one (i.e. “communication” network) increased its small-world-ness, providing a larger number of information channels and more social reinforcement chances for niche actors to innovate. Overall, results suggest that policy makers should accompany and ease the innovation-niche evolution path by fostering the participation of the laggard behind and actors' clusterization, moderating any possible lock-in risk.
{"title":"Uncovering network changes in the evolution of an innovation niche","authors":"Edgardo Sica , Pasquale Marcello Falcone , Antonio Lopolito","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The present paper aims at unravelling the networking dynamics regarding the evolution of an innovation-niche, by looking at its network configuration over time. To this end, we investigate the actors’ role within the network as well as the network architecture. We employ the social network analysis (SNA) to four different but interrelated types of networks characterising the Italian biofuel industry. Each network was investigated in both its development and maturity phase. Our findings show that, over the niche evolution, actors established new relations, increasing networks’ density and making the networks more centralized. Furthermore, while two out of four networks confirmed their small world configuration over time, one (i.e. “communication” network) increased its small-world-ness, providing a larger number of information channels and more social reinforcement chances for niche actors to innovate. Overall, results suggest that policy makers should accompany and ease the innovation-niche evolution path by fostering the participation of the laggard behind and actors' clusterization, moderating any possible lock-in risk.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 87-100"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145018423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.004
Miguel A. González-Casado , Alejandro Cruzado Rey , Miroslav Pulgar Corrotea , Christopher McCarty , José Luis Molina , Angel Sánchez
This article presents an analysis of the impact of the number of alters elicited in an ego network on the structural properties of those networks. There continues to be debate about the pros and cons of eliciting a fixed number of alters for each respondent versus allowing the respondent to list as many or few alters as they would like. This article explores a random assignment of respondents to three treatment groups – (1) a fixed number of alters set at 30, (2) a variable number of alters up to 45, and (3) a variable number of alters up to 45 with a 20 alter minimum. The results indicate that, from a non-structural perspective, all levels of emotional proximity, interaction contexts, genders, and ages are consistently sampled across the three treatment groups. At the structural level, the behavior of individual metrics is also largely similar. However, the most significant differences arise in the collective behavior of structural metrics—specifically, in their correlation structure, the amount of redundant information each variable provides, and the diversity and interpretability of the observed structural variability. When a data collection strategy constrains network size, it reduces the sparsity of the correlation matrix, effectively decreasing the number of independent global variables needed to describe network structure and making these global variables less interpretable. In other words, networks constructed with a survey that limits size tend to be more similar to each other, exhibiting less structural diversity and yielding differences that are harder to interpret. However, we discuss how these differences may simply be mathematical artifacts, without necessarily implying a clear advantage in choosing one treatment over another. Finally, we argue that the field needs a targeted study to answer whether the differing numbers of alters listed is a function of network size.
{"title":"Collecting a large number of alters in egocentric network research: A comparative analysis of three approaches","authors":"Miguel A. González-Casado , Alejandro Cruzado Rey , Miroslav Pulgar Corrotea , Christopher McCarty , José Luis Molina , Angel Sánchez","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article presents an analysis of the impact of the number of alters elicited in an ego network on the structural properties of those networks. There continues to be debate about the pros and cons of eliciting a fixed number of alters for each respondent versus allowing the respondent to list as many or few alters as they would like. This article explores a random assignment of respondents to three treatment groups – (1) a fixed number of alters set at 30, (2) a variable number of alters up to 45, and (3) a variable number of alters up to 45 with a 20 alter minimum. The results indicate that, from a non-structural perspective, all levels of emotional proximity, interaction contexts, genders, and ages are consistently sampled across the three treatment groups. At the structural level, the behavior of individual metrics is also largely similar. However, the most significant differences arise in the collective behavior of structural metrics—specifically, in their correlation structure, the amount of redundant information each variable provides, and the diversity and interpretability of the observed structural variability. When a data collection strategy constrains network size, it reduces the sparsity of the correlation matrix, effectively decreasing the number of independent global variables needed to describe network structure and making these global variables less interpretable. In other words, networks constructed with a survey that limits size tend to be more similar to each other, exhibiting less structural diversity and yielding differences that are harder to interpret. However, we discuss how these differences may simply be mathematical artifacts, without necessarily implying a clear advantage in choosing one treatment over another. Finally, we argue that the field needs a targeted study to answer whether the differing numbers of alters listed is a function of network size.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 78-86"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144932941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-31DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.001
Khrystyna Holynska , Renato Corbetta , Carter T. Butts , C. Ben Gibson
International sanctions have been an increasingly common tool for enforcing international norms of behavior, among other goals. There is continuing debate on what drives sanctioning behavior: while IR theories of sanctions have a long empirical history, more recent studies identify a need to extend these theories to better account for the endogenous nature of state sanction networks. Using a combination of network and IR-based insights, we aim to build a theory-driven, interpretable model of international sanctions that has high predictive utility. Using a separable version of dynamic network logistic regression, we test network theories of “Matthew effects”, reciprocity, and previous state-level sanctioning activity alongside traditional IR theories regarding the democratic peace, cultural or institutional similarity, power imbalance, and trade. Though we find that mechanisms from established IR theories largely hold with the inclusion of network endogeneity, endogenous network effects are more powerful than traditional IR concepts for predictive accuracy of the sanctioning network. We also find considerable differences for factors driving the imposition of sanctions (tie formation) versus persistence of sanction regimes (persistence), pointing to the importance of treating such effects separately.
{"title":"Can an eye for an eye turn the whole world sanctioned?","authors":"Khrystyna Holynska , Renato Corbetta , Carter T. Butts , C. Ben Gibson","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>International sanctions have been an increasingly common tool for enforcing international norms of behavior, among other goals. There is continuing debate on what drives sanctioning behavior: while IR theories of sanctions have a long empirical history, more recent studies identify a need to extend these theories to better account for the endogenous nature of state sanction networks. Using a combination of network and IR-based insights, we aim to build a theory-driven, interpretable model of international sanctions that has high predictive utility. Using a separable version of dynamic network logistic regression, we test network theories of “Matthew effects”, reciprocity, and previous state-level sanctioning activity alongside traditional IR theories regarding the democratic peace, cultural or institutional similarity, power imbalance, and trade. Though we find that mechanisms from established IR theories largely hold with the inclusion of network endogeneity, endogenous network effects are more powerful than traditional IR concepts for predictive accuracy of the sanctioning network. We also find considerable differences for factors driving the imposition of sanctions (tie formation) versus persistence of sanction regimes (persistence), pointing to the importance of treating such effects separately.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 62-77"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144922615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-26DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.002
Sergio Díaz-Aranda , Juan Marcos Ramírez , Jose Aguilar , Rosa E. Lillo , Antonio Fernández Anta
The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) is a relatively recent statistical approach for estimating the prevalence of unknown populations through indirect surveys utilizing information about the respondents’ social circles. The popularity of NSUM has increased in recent years due to its ability to uphold privacy and cost-effectiveness. However, the NSUM is not exempt from biases resulting from participants’ behavior. In addition, the simpler and most popular NSUM estimators are based on averages, making them sensitive to deviations in the samples, which may cause significant errors. This work aims to study how robust procedures can overcome misreporting, contamination, and deviation due to conditions such as barrier effects, prevalence, skewness, and tail length. Specifically, the central objective of the article is to analyze the statistical robustness of NSUM methods, studying whether these methods are affected by outliers or unusual data. We employ eight robust proposals for each of the two classical NSUM estimators. We analyze robust estimators through simulation experiments using synthetic random networks such as Erdős–Rényi, Scale Free, and Stochastic Block Model structures to model different degree distributions and community structures with different prevalence levels in contaminated and uncontaminated scenarios. We compare the results of the simulations with real data on COVID-19 indicators in the United Kingdom and voting intention in the Spanish General Elections of 2023. This article shows that the classical NSUM estimators perform poorly in contaminated scenarios, while most of the robust proposals are not considerably affected. However, the performance of some robust NSUM estimators decreases under barrier effects. In addition, we observe that distortions created by small prevalence play an important role in selecting the most suitable robust NSUM estimator. Particularly, the robustification of the Mean of Ratios () estimator based on the Myriad operator typically exhibits the best performance (for MoR methods) across the various social network structures for different prevalence levels, reducing the estimation error regarding the non-robust methods by up to three orders of magnitude in contaminated scenarios.
{"title":"Robust network scale-up method estimators","authors":"Sergio Díaz-Aranda , Juan Marcos Ramírez , Jose Aguilar , Rosa E. Lillo , Antonio Fernández Anta","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.08.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) is a relatively recent statistical approach for estimating the prevalence of unknown populations through indirect surveys utilizing information about the respondents’ social circles. The popularity of NSUM has increased in recent years due to its ability to uphold privacy and cost-effectiveness. However, the NSUM is not exempt from biases resulting from participants’ behavior. In addition, the simpler and most popular NSUM estimators are based on averages, making them sensitive to deviations in the samples, which may cause significant errors. This work aims to study how robust procedures can overcome misreporting, contamination, and deviation due to conditions such as barrier effects, prevalence, skewness, and tail length. Specifically, the central objective of the article is to analyze the statistical robustness of NSUM methods, studying whether these methods are affected by outliers or unusual data. We employ eight robust proposals for each of the two classical NSUM estimators. We analyze robust estimators through simulation experiments using synthetic random networks such as Erdős–Rényi, Scale Free, and Stochastic Block Model structures to model different degree distributions and community structures with different prevalence levels in contaminated and uncontaminated scenarios. We compare the results of the simulations with real data on COVID-19 indicators in the United Kingdom and voting intention in the Spanish General Elections of 2023. This article shows that the classical NSUM estimators perform poorly in contaminated scenarios, while most of the robust proposals are not considerably affected. However, the performance of some robust NSUM estimators decreases under barrier effects. In addition, we observe that distortions created by small prevalence play an important role in selecting the most suitable robust NSUM estimator. Particularly, the robustification of the Mean of Ratios (<span><math><mi>MoR</mi></math></span>) estimator based on the Myriad operator typically exhibits the best performance (for MoR methods) across the various social network structures for different prevalence levels, reducing the estimation error regarding the non-robust methods by up to three orders of magnitude in contaminated scenarios.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 46-61"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144895548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-18DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.008
Alejandro Plaza , Guillermo Beck , Julio Iturra-Sanhueza , Gabriel Otero , Benjamín Muñoz
Existing research on attitudes towards inequality has predominantly focused on individual class or socioeconomic position, with little attention paid to the role of personal networks. The limited existing research has primarily focused on the influence of specific class ties, while overlooking a crucial dimension: network size. Moreover, the lack of quantitative data containing information about socioeconomic standing, network configuration and attitudes over time for a group of the same individuals has hindered the accurate testing of the influence of personal networks on attitudes towards inequality. To address these gaps, the main goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which changes in the size and heterogeneity of acquaintanceship networks affect attitudes towards inequality in Chile – a country with high levels of income and wealth inequality. We utilise quantitative data from two waves (2016–2018) of a representative panel survey for the urban Chilean population, provided by the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey (ELSOC). Our cross-sectional analyses indicate that network heterogeneity and network size both enhance perceptions of income inequality and preferences for equality, while decreasing perceptions of meritocracy. In the fixed effects regression models, however, network size is more closely linked to an increased perception of inequality, while network heterogeneity is more strongly associated with greater preferences for equality. Moreover, increases in network size tend to reduce meritocratic perceptions. These findings suggest that network size and network heterogeneity are complementary network characteristics in explaining attitudes towards inequality.
{"title":"Networked inequality: The role of changes in network heterogeneity and network size in attitudes towards inequality","authors":"Alejandro Plaza , Guillermo Beck , Julio Iturra-Sanhueza , Gabriel Otero , Benjamín Muñoz","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Existing research on attitudes towards inequality has predominantly focused on individual class or socioeconomic position, with little attention paid to the role of personal networks. The limited existing research has primarily focused on the influence of specific class ties, while overlooking a crucial dimension: network size. Moreover, the lack of quantitative data containing information about socioeconomic standing, network configuration and attitudes over time for a group of the same individuals has hindered the accurate testing of the influence of personal networks on attitudes towards inequality. To address these gaps, the main goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which changes in the size and heterogeneity of acquaintanceship networks affect attitudes towards inequality in Chile – a country with high levels of income and wealth inequality. We utilise quantitative data from two waves (2016–2018) of a representative panel survey for the urban Chilean population, provided by the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey (ELSOC). Our cross-sectional analyses indicate that network heterogeneity and network size both enhance perceptions of income inequality and preferences for equality, while decreasing perceptions of meritocracy. In the fixed effects regression models, however, network size is more closely linked to an increased perception of inequality, while network heterogeneity is more strongly associated with greater preferences for equality. Moreover, increases in network size tend to reduce meritocratic perceptions. These findings suggest that network size and network heterogeneity are complementary network characteristics in explaining attitudes towards inequality.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 27-45"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144863644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study examines the co-evolution of informal social status and the three positions in a gossip triad – gossip senders, receivers, and objects – in the workplace. Two different social mechanisms are proposed to explain these interrelationships, suggesting relationships between gossip and informal social status in the opposite direction. First, the social bonding perspective suggests that gossip bonds between actors in a gossip triad shape their informal social status. Second, the social capital perspective indicates that employees’ informal social status leads to their position within gossip triads. The hypotheses are tested in a three-wave social network study among employees in a Dutch childcare organization. Results of stochastic actor-oriented models indicate a co-evolution between informal social status and the receiver’s role in a gossip triad, but not with the roles of sender and object. Contrary to what the social capital perspective predicts, employees’ informal social status negatively affects receiving gossip over time. In line with the social bonding perspective, receiving gossip positively affects informal social status over time. The co-evolution process suggests that over time, an equilibrium may emerge where an employee’s informal social status stabilizes at a point where enough gossip is received to sustain their social position. We conclude that the previously often neglected receivers of third-party information should be considered when examining the dynamics of workplace gossip.
{"title":"The co-evolution of informal social status and gossip in workplace social networks","authors":"Emily Kruidhof , Rense Corten , Lea Ellwardt , Rafael Wittek","doi":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.socnet.2025.07.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the co-evolution of informal social status and the three positions in a gossip triad – gossip senders, receivers, and objects – in the workplace. Two different social mechanisms are proposed to explain these interrelationships, suggesting relationships between gossip and informal social status in the opposite direction. First, the social bonding perspective suggests that gossip bonds between actors in a gossip triad shape their informal social status. Second, the social capital perspective indicates that employees’ informal social status leads to their position within gossip triads. The hypotheses are tested in a three-wave social network study among employees in a Dutch childcare organization. Results of stochastic actor-oriented models indicate a co-evolution between informal social status and the receiver’s role in a gossip triad, but not with the roles of sender and object. Contrary to what the social capital perspective predicts, employees’ informal social status negatively affects receiving gossip over time. In line with the social bonding perspective, receiving gossip positively affects informal social status over time. The co-evolution process suggests that over time, an equilibrium may emerge where an employee’s informal social status stabilizes at a point where enough gossip is received to sustain their social position. We conclude that the previously often neglected receivers of third-party information should be considered when examining the dynamics of workplace gossip.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48353,"journal":{"name":"Social Networks","volume":"84 ","pages":"Pages 9-26"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144813925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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