Lynn Smith-Lovin

Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades

Have the core discussion networks of Americans changed in the past two decades? In 1985, the General Social Survey (GSS) collected the first nationally representative data on the confidants with whom Americans discuss important matters. In the 2004 GSS the authors replicated those questions to assess social change in core network structures. Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third (one confidant), from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Most people have densely interconnected confidants similar to them. Some changes reflect the changing demographics of the U.S. population. Educational heterogeneity of social ties has decreased, racial heterogeneity has increased. The data may overestimate the number of social isolates, but these shrinking networks reflect an important social change in America

Homophily in voluntary organizations: Status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups.

Recent work on the organized sources of network ties and on the social structural determinants of association are synthesized to produce several hypotheses about homophily. These hypotheses are tested with data on 304 face-to-face groups from 10 communities. We find that friends are more similar on status dimensions than chance and that this homophily is produced both by the restricted opportunity structure offered by the group and by homophilous choices made within the group. Organizational heterogeneity leads to substantially greater dyadic status distance within the organization, while organization size consistently reduces dyadic status distance. At a given level of diversity, a larger group will permit more homophilous friendship pairing. However, correlated status dimensions create little reduction in dyadic social distance. In general, homogeneity within groups is the overwhelming determinant of homophily.

INTERRUPTIONS IN GROUP DISCUSSIONS: THE EFFECTS OF GENDER AND GROUP COMPOSITION*

Conversations both reflect and maintain social inequalities. They import hierarchical structures from larger society and help perpetuate them by creating inequalities in the ability to accomplish interactional goals. In this study of speaker transitions in six-person, task-oriented experimental groups, we explore the well-known finding that men interrupt women more frequently than women interrupt men. We ask three questions about the structure of interruptions. Who attempts to interrupt whom and under what conditions? How does the affective character of interruptions vary across speakers and groups? What determines whether an interruption succeeds? We find that gender inequality in these task-oriented discussions is created by a mixture of attempts to use power and of differential success. In their interruptions, men discriminate by sex in attempts and in yielding to interruptions by others. Women interrupt and yield the floor to males and females equally. The sex composition of the group affects interruption patterns in complex ways. Men interrupt men with supportive comments in all-male groups, but these supportive interruptions drop as the number of women in the group increases. Supportive interruptions also succeed in gaining the floor more often in single-sex groups. Taken together, the results suggest a mixture of status and conflict models and reaffirm the importance of group composition in interaction.

Women and Weak Ties: Differences by Sex in the Size of Voluntary Organizations

This paper explores some network consequences of dramatic differences between men and women in the typical size of the voluntary organizations they belong to.These size differences are greatest in organizations that are most economically oriented. Furthermore, the differences are remarkably consistent across social categories; men tend to belong to larger organizations when compared with women in similar categories, whether of work status, age, education, or marital status. Men are located in core organizations which are large and related to economic institutions, while women are located in peripheral organizations whichare smaller and more focused on domestic or community affairs. Even though men and women have almost exactly the same number of memberships on the average, thedramatic differences in the sizes and types of their organizations expose men tomany more potential contacts and other resources than women.

Gender, children, and social contact : The effects of childrearing for men and women

The authors investigate the impact of childrearing on mens and womens social networks, using a probability sample of residents of 10 Great Plains towns. Data support the hypotheses that social network size, contact volume and composition vary with the age of the youngest child in a family. Childrearing reduces womens network size and contact volume, while it alters the composition of mens networks. Effects are most pronounced when the youngest child is around three years old. These results suggest the possibility that sex differences in structural location (in the sense of embeddedness in social networks) explain sex differences in outcomes over the life course. The gender-specific effects of this life stage may accrue because childrearing places men and women in separate social worlds; childbearing and childrearing thus may be a crucial phase in the process by which gender differences are created and maintained

Selective interaction as a strategy for identity maintenance : an affect control model

In this paper we answer the question : Do people select interaction partners to enhance their self-image, or do they strive to maintain a stable view of self ? Affect control theory, a quantified version of symbolic interactionism, predicts that individuals adopt strategies which maintain their identities in order to secure a stable definition of the situation. When individuals have low self-esteem, they select interactions that maintain this low self-esteem, even when these interactions cause negative emotions. Two experiments examined the cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects of identity-confirming and -disconfirming information. Study 1, which assessed the cognitive and emotional outcomes of identity-relevant feedback, revealed that people with both high and low self-esteem fell good when praised and bad when they receive negative feedback on their performance. People with low self-esteem, however, think that the criticism is accurate, and like the critic more than do people with high self-esteem

Symbolic Interactionism as Affect Control.

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Nonrecursive models of labor force participation, fertility behavior and sex role attitudes.

A negative relationship has been established between female labor force participation and fertility but there has been considerable controversy over the direction and causes of this relationship. 2 causal models of the actual fertility and work behavior of a national sample of married women aged 30 in 1970 are examined using the 2-stage least-squares technique to disentangle reciprocal effects. A 2-variable feedback loop incorporating only fertility and labor force participation and a 3-variable model which adds sex role attitudes to the endogenous variables are included. Much of the work-fertility relationship can be accounted for by controlling background variables such as education and marital duration yet a negative effect from fertility to labor force participation remains. Adding sex role attitudes to the model as a potential source and consequence of fertility and work behavior slightly reduces the size of this effect. In sum the results seem to indicate that the worker and mother roles were to some extent incompatible for these young married women. For this cohort at least the childbearing and rearing role appears to have taken precedence. Work behavior was influenced by the number of children the women had during their 20s; childbearing was not influenced by their work.(AUTHORS MODIFIED)

Impressions from events

A large study of event stimuli developed new equations for describing how people react to events. Exploratory work found several new interaction terms affecting the impression formation process. To demonstrate the generality of the impression formation process across subject populations and study procedures, the results from the current study were compared to four others: two earlier studies on U.S. college undergraduates, a study of Belfast, Northern Ireland, high school students, and an Arabic study of well‐educated Egyptians and Lebanese. Striking similarities in evaluation dynamics appeared in all studies. All English‐speakers had similar potency and activity dynamics, while the Arabic study showed subtantial differences in the processing of these dimensions.

Social Distance in the United States Sex, Race, Religion, Age, and Education Homophily among Confidants, 1985 to 2004

Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily—the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions—sex, race/ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, and education—changed over the past two decades in core discussion networks. Changes in the actual level of homophily are driven by the demographic composition of the United States. As the nation has become more diverse, cross-category contacts in race/ethnicity and religion have increased. After describing the raw homophily rates, we develop a case-control model to assess homophily relative to chance mixing. We find decreasing rates of homophily for gender but stability for race and age, although the young are increasingly isolated from older cohorts outside of the family. We also find some weak evidence for increasing educational and religious homophily. These relational trends may be explained by changes in demographic heterogeneity, institutional segregation, economic inequality, and symbolic boundaries.