Networks in contexts : How meeting opportunities affect personal relationships

From a sociological perspective, this study challenges the idea that personal relationships and networks are a simple result of an individual’s preferences for certain types of associates. The social contexts we enter in our daily lives, such as the work place, the family, the neighborhood, clubs and associations, provide the ‘pool’ of available others out of which we select our personal network members. This means that with whom we work and socialize, with whom we become friends, and even whom we marry is not merely a private decision, but also depends on conditions beyond ourselves. Two waves of the Survey of the Social Networks of the Dutch (1999/2000 and 2007) provide detailed information on the personal networks of about 1000, respectively 600 respondents, who are representative of the Dutch population between 18 and 72 years of age. With this information, we show that opportunities for contact affect personal relationships and networks by examining how meeting in various social contexts affects the composition of personal networks, characteristics of relationships, the structure of personal networks, and changes in personal networks after seven years. First, we show that similarity (in terms of age, sex, level of education, and religion) in personal relationships depends on the social context in which we find these people. Moreover, taking into account that there is more similarity in strong relationships than in weak relationships, the social context in which we meet each other affects similarity rather consistently across relationships of different strength. More specifically, the social composition of the context in which we meet each our network members affects the social composition of the resulting network, in particular if a context takes much of our time and if interactions within a context are institutionally regulated or enforced. A second way in which the selection of network members is constrained by social contexts is the path-dependent use of social contexts. If we have multiple close network members, the context from which we draw subsequent network members depends on the context from which we have drawn our first network member. As a result, we generally find network members who are less similar to us than if we would have drawn additional network members from other social contexts. Third, we show in two different ways that the degree to which the contexts in which we meet our network members overlap affects our personal network. The number of activities we undertake with a network member is positively affected by the number of contexts in which we meet each other, and in particular sharing multiple private contexts, such as at home, with family, or with friends. Furthermore, if we share the same social context with two of our network members, it is much more likely that these network members also mutually know each other well, such that we get a closed, dense network. Finally, we examine how social contexts affect changes in personal networks over seven years. Worthy of mention is that, while the size of personal networks is remarkably stable over time, we substitute many of our initial network members for new ones. Next, we show that relationship continuation depends on the particular social context in which we meet each other as well as that many relationships are discontinued because of a lack of meeting opportunities, e.g., because we left the context in which we met these network members. Furthermore, meeting new network members in a certain context is more likely if we met another network member in that particular context before, but especially if we