Browsing by Author "Moody, James W"

Adolescence is a key point in the life course, and friendships during this time are strong predictors of health and behavioral outcomes. This dissertation seeks to understand the causes and consequences of friendship stability, answering the question: Friendships during adolescence are important, but does it matter how long they last? Chapter Two introduces a new measure of friendship stability and tests possible pathways by which it affects extreme outcomes, threatening oneself or others. The findings indicate that some of these mechanisms partially explain this relationship, but low network instability remains strongly associated with the outcomes.Chapter Three examines the possible causes of friendship dissolution, as adolescents are more likely to dissolve the more unstable their networks. This chapter simultaneously tests individual, dyadic, and structural predictors of dissolution. The findings suggest that ego’s perception of intimacy, as well as the structural and dyadic features of the relationship, are the most prominent predictors of dissolution. Additionally, the results suggest differing relationships between several structural and dyadic features when considering whether friendship is reciprocated. Chapter four examines the relationship between racial peer mixing and mental health. I tested the effect of having cross-race ties on mental health, conditional on individuals being a racial minority in their school population. I also test whether two contextual factors of egos friendships, intimacy, and stability–mediate this relationship. I found that when adolescents are minorities in their schools, cross-race friendships somewhat protect them from emotional distress, and that this relationship is minimally mediated by friendship intimacy.

American family relations are formally defined through marriage and descent but these formal distinctions are inadequate to capture the diversity of contemporary family life. Recent demographic trends have led to a diversification of family structures. Alternative, and less institutionalized ties like co-residence and informal partnerships bind an increasing number of families. Clearly defined cultural models do not yet exist for these new relationships. During these demographic changes the cultural dominance of the single breadwinner model has been challenged by women's mass entry into the labor market. New models of fatherhood have begun to emerge and conventional parenting roles may be carried out in diverse ways. A new method is needed to capture the relational processes of new family forms and the heterogeneity of conventional ones.

I argue families' formal structures can be classified by the things their members do, and the time they share with each other. Network methods sort family structures into discrete types that capture differences in lived experiences. The distinctions differentiating family structures from each another reveal meaningful information about how families are organized in the contemporary context. The four substantive papers in this dissertation each contribute a different demonstration of this fundamental argument.

First, the method is developed in a familiar context, using conventional distinctions embedded in kinship terms to move one step beyond traditional analyses of the family. Traditional categorical approaches enumerate traditionally defined relationships. We ask instead how patterns of consanguinity and marriage actually combine in American households, making no assumptions about the importance of any particular relation or individual attribute.

The three papers that follow are further from the traditional categorical approach. I don't assume that descent and marriage are necessary elements of family relationships. Instead, relationship types are defined by patterns of activities that children do with their potential kin. I apply the method to three waves of time use diaries from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Children's relationships with both traditional and new kin types are heterogeneous, yet structured. Next I develop and test a predictive model of parent-child relationships. The results show that allowing salient relationship features to emerge from time use data is fundamental to understanding how parent-child relationships differ by parents' attributes and household characteristics.

Finally, I examine how relationship types cohere into families. Children have the same type of family when their families are composed of a similar set of relationship types. The relations within most family types are qualitatively similar to each other - if one relationship is broad (or perfunctory) the others are likely to be as well.

Sociologists have for long explored how identities, the labels or categories people employ to define themselves and others, affect a number of processes. In this dissertation, I conduct three studies that deal with different aspects of identity and identity-related processes.

Chapter 2 deals with stigmatization and identity restoration after a wrongdoing. I investigate whether prosociality (i.e., helping others at a cost to oneself) can mitigate negative perceptions of a moral transgressor. I utilize affect control theory and its impression formation principles to derive hypotheses about how perceptions of the moral transgressor will change according to levels of future prosociality and perceptions of the goodness-badness and powerfulness-powerlessness of prosociality beneficiaries. I show prosociality positively can restore positive perceptions of the protagonist, depending on who benefits from prosociality. Benefitting people perceived as good has more of a restorative effect compared to benefitting people perceived as weak. Results suggest prosocial behaviors lead to positive perceptions to the extent that they benefit those seen as deserving the benefit.

Chapter 3 addresses the problem of identity structures by explicitly conceptualizing them as multilayer networks of interrelated identities. Using network analysis techniques, I map identity structures and investigate which (if any) elements lie at the center of the structure. In addition, investigate the claim that values, abstract ideals that guide action, connect identities from different domains. I show country citizenship emerges as the most central node in the between-nations network. Other nodes act as intermediate hubs, connecting domain-specific regions (e.g., family or occupation) with the rest of the network. Values reliably occupy a peripheral position in the observed networks.

Chapter 4 investigates political belief systems and their organization in European countries. I employ Belief Network Analysis (BNA), a recently developed method in the sociology of culture (Boutyline and Vaisey 2017), to identify central elements in political belief systems across Europe. In its first application, BNA showed political ideology lies at the center of a network of political beliefs in the United States. I examine whether a similar pattern is observed in European political belief systems. Contrary to the U.S. case, I do not find political ideology lies at the center of the observed structures. I discuss possible factors driving this finding as well as a number of future directions that could shed light on these contradictory results.

This dissertation aims to improve our understanding of identity structures and processes. The study in Chapter 2 informs how identity processes influence moral judgments and stigmatization. The study in Chapter 3 is an initial step of a research program that leverages the strengths of the networks approach to understand identity structures. The study of political beliefs in Chapter 4 sheds light on identity meanings attached (or not) to the ideological identity across cultural contexts.

The problem of social diffusion has animated sociological thinking on topics ranging from the spread of an idea, an innovation or a disease, to the foundations of collective behavior and political polarization. While network diffusion has been a productive metaphor, the reality of diffusion processes is often muddier. Ideas and innovations diffuse differently from diseases, but, with a few exceptions, the diffusion of ideas and innovations has been modeled under the same assumptions as the diffusion of disease. In this dissertation, I develop two new diffusion models for "socially meaningful" contagions that address two of the most significant problems with current diffusion models: (1) that contagions can only spread along observed ties, and (2) that contagions do not change as they spread between people. I augment insights from these statistical and simulation models with an analysis of an empirical case of diffusion - the use of enterprise collaboration software in a large technology company. I focus the empirical study on when people abandon innovations, a crucial, and understudied aspect of the diffusion of innovations. Using timestamped posts, I analyze when people abandon software to a high degree of detail.

To address the first problem, I suggest a latent space diffusion model. Rather than treating ties as stable conduits for information, the latent space diffusion model treats ties as random draws from an underlying social space, and simulates diffusion over the social space. Theoretically, the social space model integrates both actor ties and attributes simultaneously in a single social plane, while incorporating schemas into diffusion processes gives an explicit form to the reciprocal influences that cognition and social environment have on each other. Practically, the latent space diffusion model produces statistically consistent diffusion estimates where using the network alone does not, and the diffusion with schemas model shows that introducing some cognitive processing into diffusion processes changes the rate and ultimate distribution of the spreading information. To address the second problem, I suggest a diffusion model with schemas. Rather than treating information as though it is spread without changes, the schema diffusion model allows people to modify information they receive to fit an underlying mental model of the information before they pass the information to others. Combining the latent space models with a schema notion for actors improves our models for social diffusion both theoretically and practically.

The empirical case study focuses on how the changing value of an innovation, introduced by the innovations' network externalities, influences when people abandon the innovation. In it, I find that people are least likely to abandon an innovation when other people in their neighborhood currently use the software as well. The effect is particularly pronounced for supervisors' current use and number of supervisory team members who currently use the software. This case study not only points to an important process in the diffusion of innovation, but also suggests a new approach -- computerized collaboration systems -- to collecting and analyzing data on organizational processes.

Sociologists often depict demographic categories as socially constructed, non-essential, and fluid. The language of fluid, contingent categories has not, however, translated very well into the practice of describing social change in a population. There are notable exceptions, but the typical approach is still to take fixed demographic categories, such as Black/White, and follow their outcomes over time. The first goal of this dissertation is to bridge the gap between theory and practice by offering a formal framework for measuring categorical fluidity. The second goal is to use changes in categorical meaning to explore the macro features of a social system.

First, I develop a model of categorical change rooted in interaction patterns, such as marriage or friendship rates. Interaction patterns offer an ideal metric to measure fluid demographic categories: they concretely capture social distinctions without relying solely on pre-defined labels. I consider two categories to be equivalent if the observed behavioral implications of group membership are the same, even if the labels are different. If College graduates now interact in the same manner as High School graduates used to, then College is the new HS. To formalize this idea, I place categories into social locations based on observed rates of interaction. Categories are close if interaction is likely and far if interaction is unlikely. I then ask which categories occupy the same locations over time, or have the same range of interaction partners.

Second, I apply this model to the question of racial change in America. I interpret two macro level changes, one demographic and one political, through the lens of categorical change. Demographically, there have been large increases in the number of Hispanics identifying as Other racially, as opposed to White or Black. Using Census marriage data, I find that this increase in Other-Hispanics reflects a schism in the meaning of Hispanic. The shifts in social locations point to a growing divide between those that see Hispanic as another race and those that do not. Politically, there have been large changes in the measurement of race, with individuals now allowed to claim multiple races in the census. I ask how these "new" mixed race categories fit into the existing racial order. I find that the Hispanic mixed race categories create distinct categories in a way that the mixing of traditional racial/ethnic categories does not.

Third, I use the model of categorical change to test theories of power and influence. I argue that the meaning of a category amongst one part of the population may be shaped by the experience, or changing conditions, of another part of the population. This asymmetry serves as the measure of aggregate level influence. Substantively, I apply this approach to racial stratification in the US, where I use joint changes in educational meaning and attainment to characterize systems of racial stratification from 1940-2000. Using Census data on race and education, I find that the US is characterized by a system of hegemony, where changes in attainment amongst the majority drive the meaning of education for other racial groups.

This dissertation investigates the reciprocal relationship between micro‐levelbeliefs and behaviors involving identity categories and macro‐level features of social structure. Chapters 2 and 3 explore how social psychological processes intersect with persisting network exchange structures or environmental shifts to shape the beliefs or behaviors of embedded actors. Chapter 2 uses original survey data to show how beliefs about occupations shifted shortly after the Covid‐19 pandemic began, and finds these belief changes persist into the following year for occupations made salient as the pandemic began. Chapter 3 presents a novel experiment that assigned participants to exchange networks with different structures and identity compositions. The findings show that (a) persisting network arrangements effect pro‐social behaviors in a similar way regardless of whether the networks contain actors with homogeneous or heterogeneous social identities, and that (b) interacting with dissimilar others over an extended period of time increases an actor’s trust behavior toward unmet members of the out‐group identity. Chapter 4 extends insights from the first two. The results of an agent‐based computational experiment show that initial network arrangements can enable transitive tie formation between dissimilar others – shaping the macrostructure of the network and emergence of homophily, not merely the beliefs and behaviors of the actors within them.

Research in organizational ecology demonstrates that an organization’s competitive position within its market is highly associated with its survival chances, and that patterns of competitive constraint among organizations influence how markets evolve. However, the literature’s conceptualization of market structure is relatively coarse and static; it does not explore how individual organizations’ competitive positions shift or how market offerings change over relatively short intervals of time. In this study, I use social network analysis to study the structure of organizations’ competitive relationships directly. I examine both how changes in the structure of an organization’s competitive environment influence its survival chances, and how the structure of organizations’ competitive relationships affect the stability of market offerings. With a combination of a large crowd-sourced restaurant dataset from Yelp.com and census tract information from the American Community Survey (Census Bureau, 2009; Yelp, 2019), I apply methods from social network analysis, text analysis, and geographic information systems to track how restaurants’ competitive relationships change over time and space, and to study how these changes influence restaurants’ survival chances and overall market stability. This study provides evidence for new mechanisms of competitive constraint among organizations (niche centrality and niche compression) and new mechanisms of market stability (niche redundancy), offers a new theoretic framework for studying market structure and organizational evolution, and has critical implications for theory in the field of organizational ecology.

How does gender inequality persist in the art world today? Or, more generally, what role do social characteristics like gender play in markets for cultural goods, such as art? That is the focus of this research. Using a novel dataset of 255,887 contemporary artworks produced by 18,624 artists and gleaned from an online marketplace, I employ the case of gender in the art world to investigate how social characteristics of producers can impact market outcomes and structures. Although there is prominent scholarship on product markets and inequality within sociology, questions such as these are rarely posed. Work generally focuses on the quality of goods and on the status of producing organizations, without attention to individual producer characteristics, including gender.The first study of this dissertation implements machine learning classification to examine whether female and male artists produce artworks with different characteristics. These analyses rely on a taxonomy of over 1,000 art-relevant features, coded by a team of art historians, to describe the disciplines, physical attributes, styles and periods, object types, and settings of each artwork in the dataset. I find that artworks by women and men do not substantively differ on the majority of aesthetic, conceptual, or material features that they depict. While some, less common, features of art appear more in work by women or men, by in large these two groups of producers do not bring different products to the art market. Studies two and three of this dissertation move to address alternative hypotheses for disparity in the economic outcomes of women and men in the contemporary art market. With mixed effect regression, I test whether artworks by women are priced differently than artworks by men, even after accounting for the categories and features they depict. I find that art by women is listed at a discount of approximately 10 to 12 percent relative to art by men. I also find that, of those art qualities that differ in use between women and men, qualities of art predominantly made by women are valued less than those predominantly made by men, net of who creates them. In combination, these findings echo and extend calls to value the labor of women and men comparably. They also broaden our understanding of the potential for social status characteristics, like gender, to act as organizing structures in the production, meaning, and valuation of markets.

Social network analysis is a powerful tool to describe and explain the dynamics of intergroup relations. Research using political and school networks illuminates the micro assortative mechanisms of social ties that directly contribute to the emergence of macro intergroup outcomes such as polarization and conflict. Yet these studies have not fully explored the ecological insights arising from considering how structural constraints—i.e., demographic distributions and emerging meso-group structures—contextualize tie formation, and thereby produce variation in macro intergroup outcomes. This dissertation examines the impact of higher-level constraints on tie formation and intergroup relations in the two contexts: political polarization in America and enmity formation in Adolescence. Studies 1 and 2 ask where the remarkably high level of political homophily comes from and how such relational antecedents affect opinion polarization. Drawing on macrosociological theory of network formation, I use agent-based modeling and the data from the American National Election Surveys to show the pivotal role that sociodemographic consolidation—the correlation between social positions across multiple dimensions—plays in the rise of political homophily in networks and the amplification of the echo chamber effects. Study 3 asks whether racial segregation is directly linked to conflict in schools. Constructing a unified model of friendship and enmity formation on network data collected in a racially diverse middle school, I find that the racial segregation-conflict link is not a direct one but complicated by status-group processes. Racial differences segregate friendships, but conflict is mainly triggered by the status demarcation between members and outsiders of “leading crowds” within racial groups. Combined, these three studies find that the contextual properties—consolidation and groups—condition the rates and effects of micro homophily that shape variation in intergroup conflict. In conclusion, I discuss how my contextual approach contributes to our understanding of intergroup relations in each of the substantive fields of study.

Previous research argues that people receive positive evaluations from third parties for engaging in peer punishment, which lead to reputational rewards. Recent work challenges this, however, finding instead that punishers can potentially receive negative evaluations from others. These conflicting arguments present a set of open questions regarding third-party evaluations of punishers and the factors shaping them. This dissertation offers three studies intended to improve knowledge surrounding these questions. These studies contribute to research in this area by using data from real-world settings to test experimental findings from the laboratory, and by considering how punishers can use verbal justifications to shape third-party evaluations of their actions.

The first of these studies, contained in Chapter 2, uses data from therapeutic communities for addiction treatment (TCs) to determine if people generally receive reputational rewards for engaging in peer punishment. Using social network analysis of data from four TCs, it asks whether residents of these communities are more likely to be identified as “role models” by others when they engage in punishment. Results offer mixed support for this being the case, with punishers being more likely to receive role model nominations from peers in two communities but no more likely in the other two. Simultaneously, results indicate that punishers are more likely to receive role model nominations from supervisory staff. Findings from this study show how punishers may or may not receive reputational rewards from peers and from authority figures, and suggest the importance of local institutional and cultural contexts in how third parties evaluate punishment.

Chapter 3 identifies the importance of social and relational factors in how people construct justifications for peer sanctions. Using social network analysis and automated text analysis on data from one TC, it examines how social proximity, status differences, and friendships shape the amount of explanatory effort made in justifications of rewards and punishment. Results indicate that these factors have different effects on the amount of explanatory effort given in justifications for rewards versus punishment. This finding suggests that TC residents use rewards and punishment to build and enact different kinds of relationships with their peers, supporting recent arguments advanced by TC scholars.

Using two online vignette experiments, Chapter 4 considers how third-party evaluations change when punishers mention specific social actors when justifying punishment. These experiments measured participants’ evaluations of punishers who mentioned themselves, a friend, a stranger, or a collective when justifying their actions. Results show that observers evaluate punishers more positively when punishers offer justifications that mention collectives rather than themselves. Punishers who reference individuals other than themselves also receive more positive evaluations, though this finding requires further investigation. Additional results show that people generally prefer punishment for norm violations that affect broader groups rather than specific individuals. However, this preference appears to have no effect on how third parties evaluate punishers based on whom they mention in justifications.

Overall findings from this dissertation contribute to research on cooperation, punishment, and “metanorms” surrounding the propriety of peer punishment. Findings from select chapters make additional contributions to other areas of inquiry, including sociological theories of accounts and justifications and clinical research on therapeutic communities as a form of addiction treatment. These contributions are discussed in detail in their respective chapters, as well as in the concluding piece of this dissertation.

Does the movement of people between cities influence the economic prosperity of those cities? I examine highway and air travel network data for continental US cities between 2000 and 2010 to argue that it might. My argument consists of three analyses. The first uses network ARMA modeling to show that there is an association between the US travel network and city median income. However, the explanatory contribution of the network varies from 2\% to 16\%, depending on the model specified. The second uses two-stage dyadic linear modeling to establish directionality, showing that the association is less likely to reflect the influence of prosperity on travel networks than vis versa. However, these models explain only 17\% of the variation in traffic volumes. The third addresses causality. It uses a natural experiment design to demonstrate that natural disasters in distant countries correspond to diminished city median incomes for the US cities with connections to them, but not for a propensity-matched sample of unconnected cities. However, the finding are not statistically significant at the .05 level (p= .09), and the estimated size of the effect is implausibly large. Together, the analyses examine the association, directionality and causation, raising the possibility that the movement of people between networks influences the prosperity of those cities.

Human social life requires navigating complex patterns of relationships that create underlying structures of social integration. In adolescence, teens manage close friendships while simultaneously evaluating their social position in broader peer groups and the larger school peer context. Social structures in each dimension of the peer network can relate to symptoms of mental distress, including depressive symptoms and self-harm, both critical health risks in this life course stage. Moreover, any association between network structure and mental health likely depends on contextual features that shape social relations and health, such as gender and friends’ mental health. In this dissertation, I examine distinct dimensions of social integration and contextual features of networks to clarify when social integration among peers relates to better and worse mental health for teens. Using survey data from PROSPER, I test the association of network position with depressive symptoms and self-harm by gender and friends’ mental distress.

In Chapter 2, I disentangle local and global social integration among peers by gender and friends’ depression to clarify how adolescent network integration relates to depressive symptoms. Analyses indicate global integration is protective for both boys and girls. Friends’ depression is largely irrelevant for boys. For girls with depressive friends, increased global integration predicts increased depressive symptoms, while greater local integration buffers associations between friends’ depression and girls’ own depressive symptoms. Results indicate the importance of considering distinct types of social integration by gender for depressive symptoms in adolescence.

Chapter 3 examines peer networks and self-harm, or intentional injury to one’s own body. I find that self-harm is largely unrelated to social position for boys, with only a small association between self-harm and being in the core of a peer group. For girls, however, greater integration among close friends and the overall peer network is associated with lower self-harm, unless friends are harming, then greater integration predicts higher self-harm. These results indicate that structures of cohesive close friendships and status among peers reduce self-harm risks for girls only in contexts where integration does not reinforce behaviors of harming peers.

Overall, this work demonstrates that distinct dimensions of social integration in peer social networks relate to depressive symptoms and self-harm in adolescence. However, these levels of structural integration should be considered in connection with features that shape the meaning of network structure. Further research is needed to define mechanisms linking integration to mental health, particularly self-harm, and to examine the consequences of this interplay between adolescent social integration and mental distress for health in subsequent life course stages.

Current theories of marriage and family formation behavior tend to rely on the assumption that people can and do consciously plan both fertility and marriage and post-hoc intentions should align with a priori reasons for action (Fishbein & Azjen 2010). However, research shows this is not always the case and researchers have labeled inconsistencies between pre- and post- reports of intentions and behavior as retrospective bias. Researchers such as Bongaarts (1990) have tried to create models that minimize this "bias".

The Theory of Conjunctural Action is a new model that can explain, rather than explain away, this "bias" (Johnson-Hanks et al. 2011; Morgan and Bachrach 2011). This new theoretical innovation uses insights about the workings of the mind to gain a greater understanding of how individuals report family formation decisions and how and why they might change over time. In this theory, individuals experience conjunctures (or social context which exists in the material world) and use cognitive schemas (or frames within the mind through which individuals use to interpret the world around them). These schemas are multiple and the set can change over time as individuals incorporate new experiences into them.

In this dissertation, I explore how and why pre- and post- reports of intentions may be different using insights from the Theory of Conjunctural Action. In the second chapter, using data from the NLSY79 and log-linear models, I show that there are considerable inconsistencies between prospective and retrospective reports of fertility intentions. Specifically, nearly 6% of births (346 out of 6022) are retrospectively reported as unwanted at the time of conception by women who prospectively reported they wanted more children one or two years prior to the birth. Similarly, over 400 births are retrospectively reported as wanted by women who intended to have no more births one or two years prior (i.e., in the prior survey wave). The innovation here is to see this inconsistency, not as an error in reporting, but as different construals of a seemingly similar question. In other words, women may not be consciously intending births and then enacting these intentions; rather women may have different schemas (or meanings) of prospective and retrospective measures of fertility intentions.

The next chapter uses this same data to test if women use different schemas to guide their reporting of prospective and retrospective fertility intentions. Again, using insights from the Theory of Conjunctural Action, I expect that different schemas (represented by different sets of variables) predict prospective and retrospective wantedness differentially. I show that retrospective reports of wantedness are guided more by age, marital status, education, job satisfaction, and educational enrollment at birth, while prospective wantedness was guided more by number of children desired and how many children they currently have. I show four logistic models predicting wanted verses unwanted births. I then compared the model fit of logistic models predicting prospective wanted verses unwanted births using the hypothesized prospective and retrospective schema variables and I did the same for the models of retrospective wantedness. I find that when women report retrospective wantedness, they are guided more by the hypothesized variables.

Finally, in the last empirical paper, because schemas are difficult to measure, I build a methodology, Network Text Analysis, to measure schemas and to understand the schemas surrounding marriage and fertility for low-income Blacks who have not yet had children. I use interview data from the Becoming Parents and Partners Study (BPP), a sample of young, unmarried, childless adults with low incomes. I use these data to explore schemas of childbearing and marriage. Contrary to previous findings that low-income parents do not link marriage and fertility and have different requirements for marriage and fertility, I find that marriage and childbearing are indeed linked and have similar requirements for low-income Blacks prior to childbearing. Low income Blacks hold quite traditional views about the role of marriage and its sequencing vis-à-vis fertility. I argue that the material constraints to marital childbearing may lead to non-marital births and thus respondents sever schemas connecting marriage and childbearing and adopt other schemas of childbearing to provide ad hoc justifications for their behavior.