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Familiar faces, familiar spaces: Social similarity and co-presence in non-relational behavioral convergence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

RACHEL BEHLER ,
CHAN SUH ,
MATTHEW BRASHEARS  and
YONGREN SHI
RACHEL BEHLER
Affiliation:
Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA (e-mail: [email protected])
CHAN SUH
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Korea (e-mail: [email protected])
MATTHEW BRASHEARS
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA (e-mail: [email protected])
YONGREN SHI
Affiliation:
Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA (e-mail: [email protected])
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Abstract

Social influence is frequently measured through an ego's direct ties. Although influence may also stem from an ego's indirect ties, reference group, and casual contacts, it is difficult to capture their impact using existing network methods. We identify and trace the influence stemming from an ego's “familiar others,” consisting of those socially similar individuals with whom the ego comes in contact at school, but does not necessarily share a relationship. To evaluate the role of familiar others, we investigate unhealthy weight behaviors in adolescence using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Our results demonstrate that familiar others' unhealthy weight-related behaviors are strong predictors of the ego's own weight behaviors, net of immediate alters' behaviors, and individual-level characteristics. Further, we find that this relationship is stronger and more robust than that between egos and their direct ties. These results suggest that familiar others constitute a key source of social influence that is distinct from the influence of network alters.

Keywords

social influencebehavioral convergencenon-relational contagionweak tiesmethodologyhealthweightsocial networks
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 396 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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