Multidimensional tie strength and economic development.
Sci Rep
; 12(1): 22081, 2022 12 21.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-36543831
ABSTRACT
The strength of social relations has been shown to affect an individual's access to opportunities. To date, however, the correspondence between tie strength and population's economic prospects has not been quantified, largely because of the inability to operationalise strength based on Granovetter's classic theory. Our work departed from the premise that tie strength is a unidimensional construct (typically operationalized with frequency or volume of contact), and used instead a validated model of ten fundamental dimensions of social relationships grounded in the literature of social psychology. We built state-of-the-art NLP tools to infer the presence of these dimensions from textual communication, and analyzed a large conversation network of 630K geo-referenced Reddit users across the entire US connected by 12.8M social ties created over the span of 7 years. We found that unidimensional tie strength is only weakly correlated with economic opportunities ([Formula see text]), while multidimensional constructs are highly correlated ([Formula see text]). In particular, economic opportunities are associated to the combination of (i) knowledge ties, which bridge geographically distant groups, facilitating the knowledge dissemination across communities; and (ii) social support ties, which knit geographically close communities together, and represent dependable sources of social and emotional support. These results point to the importance of developing high-quality measures of tie strength in network theory.
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Desarrollo Económico
/
Relaciones Interpersonales
Tipo de estudio:
Health_economic_evaluation
Aspecto:
Determinantes_sociais_saude
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Sci Rep
Año:
2022
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Dinamarca
Pais de publicación:
ENGLAND
/
ESCOCIA
/
GB
/
GREAT BRITAIN
/
INGLATERRA
/
REINO UNIDO
/
SCOTLAND
/
UK
/
UNITED KINGDOM