Title: Is Britain pulling apart? Analysis of generational change in social distances
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Daily life in Britain has changed in many important ways over recent decades. There have been longer-running demographic trends such as longer life expectancy and increased participation in education. Concurrently, independent adult living has increased. Routinely, people will have had other cohabiting partners before settling with a long term partner; will marry later than they would have in earlier decades; and will divorce or remarry more often. Patterns of fertility have also changed, first births occur later, and families have fewer children than in previous generations. Coupled with these demographic changes there have been notable developments in long-distance travel and, more recently, increased long-distance communication through electronic means (especially the internet). Taken together these changes may have substantial influence on patterns of social interaction in contemporary social life. In this project we seek to paint a picture of social life in Britain through comprehensive empirical analyses of patterns in the 'social distance' between people. By social distance we mean the closeness (or distance) between different people who have connections to each other (such as family members or friends). We conjecture that changes in social distance are a useful barometer of social change. Trends in social distance have sometimes been neglected within empirical sociological enquiries. This has partially been due to the lack of suitable data or the complexities of analysing data on linked individuals. Britain's exceptional resources in large-scale, longitudinal surveys, along with recent methodological innovations for the analysis of data on social connections, mean that it is now plausible to propose systematic analyses of trends in social distance using large-scale representative survey data. In contemporary societies social connections are important because they provide essential economic, social and psychological support. Social connections also help to shape individual attitudes, values and expectations. In many areas of social science, there is growing recognition that to comprehensively understand an individual's circumstances, we need to know more about the circumstances of those in their networks (i.e. their 'nearest and dearest'). Understanding patterns of social distance can therefore offer major insights into the composition of contemporary social structures. In the proposed analyses we are interested in exploring a wide range of different domains that are indicative of changes (or stability) in social distance. This will be a unique departure from conventional approaches that concentrate on standard socio-economic outcomes. The wide spectrum of these domains includes the connections between the political values and opinions of related people, through to their patterns of health and use of support services. Social distance trends on certain socio-economic measures have been studied in sociology and economics. Typically the focus of empirical studies has been upon either educational or occupational similarity (or homophily), or upon intergenerational associations. Large-scale surveys have not been fully exploited to assess the diverse aspects of social distance in an integrated manner. Therefore the proposed project is intellectually innovative. Funding is requested to support one full time researcher and the three investigators in a coordinated set of analyses oriented towards at least four publication objectives. The research fellow has appropriate pre-existing expertise in working with data on social connections and applying advanced statistical methods to social connections data. The proposed project builds directly upon previous ESRC supported activities which focussed upon analysing social networks and occupational data. The research will provide a solid empirical platform upon which theoretical claims about changing social circumstances in Britain can be formally tested.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE