Elsevier

Social Networks

Volume 28, Issue 4, October 2006, Pages 331-362
Social Networks

Persistence of close personal ties over a 12-year period

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2005.07.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Using data on 60 intentional communities from the Urban Communes Data Set, we examine factors related to the persistence of ties 12 years later, when nearly all members had left the groups. We find strong evidence of triadic effects—people are more likely to remain in contact with others when they share patterns of contact with third parties. Such triadic effects retain importance even when we use alternative measures of contact, and when we control for individual-, dyadic-, and group-level effects including geographic separation. When we examine friendship as opposed to contact, we find that the triadic effects can be decomposed into some effects pertaining to hierarchy and other effects pertaining to reciprocation, giving us a sense of how networks structure themselves over time.

Section snippets

Factors affecting tie persistence and decay

Network analysis has developed a number of elegant ways for envisioning or analyzing social networks conceived as static snapshots (most importantly, as binary matrices). Much less is known about the more prosaic social processes whereby ties are formed and broken. In particular, little is known about the retention of social network ties over substantial portions of the lifecourse. But a number of studies have suggested that tie persistence is likely to be affected by individual characteristics

The data set

We analyze data from the first and second major waves of Benjamin Zablocki's Urban Commune Project. This data set contains a wealth of information about the members of 60 different intentional communities. Ten communes (defined as having five or more adult members, either not all of the same sex or with at least one child, and with a collective identity known to others) were selected from the largest SMSAs in six of the census bureau's eight major areas in 1974 (for more information, see

Methods

As we shall see below, the reports to our question on frequency of contact appear to be more or less Poisson-distributed. While the underlying events on which the participants report (number of contacts) may have a different distribution, transforming the observed variables to a linear scale (by giving each response category its mean value) produced abnormal clusterings. Further, it seems likely that the actual response process is better approximated by a Poisson process (in which persons

Distribution and agreement of contact reports

We begin by analyzing reports as to frequency of contact at time 2, because we believe that the nature of the item is relatively unambiguous, and the measurement instrument relatively precise, affording us the best opportunity to test our hypotheses. Fig. 1 displays the marginal results regarding frequency of contact in terms of the number of reported dyads at any level of frequency of contact; each person contributes more than one observation. As we can see, the overall rate of contact is

Dyadic effects

Recall that the survey instrument asked each respondent to indicate for each other member whether the respondent considered alter a “friend” or a “close friend”. Here we will analyze the latter, though results using the former are similar though weaker in magnitude (analyses available upon request). It is important to note that while all members were in contact at time 1, and hence our time 2 measures were indeed measures of persistence, not all members were friends with each other at time 1,

Conclusion

Let us summarize our main conclusions. We have examined the persistence of long-term relationships among persons who formed themselves into communities. First of all, contrary to our expectations, we did not find these relationships to be eroded by family formation. Even cross-sex friendships seemed to survive ex-members getting married and having children.

Second, distance matters. It not only decreases the regularity of contact, it makes people less likely to consider themselves close friends.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, SES-99-06452. An earlier version was presented at the Working Group on Formation and Decay of Economic Networks of the Russell Sage Foundation; we would like to thank the participants for comments. We are indebted to reviewers and the editors for their comments and criticism.

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