Romantic partnerships and the dispersion of social ties: a network analysis of relationship status on facebook

ABSTRACT

A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.

References

1. Backstrom, L., Kleinberg, J. M., Lee, L., and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. Characterizing and curating conversation threads: expansion, focus, volume, re-entry. In Proc. 6th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (2013), 13--22.
2. Bearman, P., Moody, J., and Stovel, K. Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks. American J. Sociology 110, (2004).
3. Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J.-L., Lambiotte, R., and Lefebvre, E. Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics (2008).
4. Bott, E. Family and Social Network: Roles, Norms, and External Relationships in Ordinary Urban Families. Tavistock Press, 1957.
5. Burt, R. S. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Harvard University Press, 1992.
6. Coleman, J. S. Social capital in the creation of human capital. American J. Sociology 94, (1988).
7. Cornwell, B. Spousal network overlap as a basis for spousal support. J. Marriage and Family 74 (2012). 229--238.
8. Eagle, N., Pentland, A. S., and Lazer, D. Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106, (2009), 15274--15278.
9. Farnham, S., and Churchill, E. F. Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online. In Proc. 14th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2011), 359--368.
10. Field, S. L. The focused organization of social ties. American J. Sociology 86, (1981), 1015--1035.
11. Felmlee, D. H. No couple is an island: A social network perspective on dyadic stability. Social Forces 79 4 (2001), 1259--1287.
12. Fischer, C. To Dwell Among Friends. U. Chicago, 1982.
13. Griedman, J. H. Greedy function approximation: A gradient boosting machine. Ann. Statistics 29 (2000), 1189--1232.
14. Gilbert, E., and Karahalios, K. Predicting tie strength with social media. In Proc. 27th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2009), 211--220.
15. Granovetter, M. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973), 1360--1380.
16. Granovetter, M. Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91, 3 (Nov. 1985), 481--510.
17. Jones, J. J., Settle, J. E., Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Marlow, C., and Fowler, J. H. Inferring tie strength from online directed behavior. PLoS ONE 8 (2013), 1 (Jan. 2013), e52168.
18. Kalmijn, M. Shared friendship networks and the life course. Social Networks 25 (2003), 231--249.
19. Kossinets, G., and Watts, D. Empirical analysis of an evolving social network. Science 311 (2006), 88--90.
20. Le, B., Dove, N. L., Agnew, C. R., Korn, M. S., and Mutso, A. A. Predicting nonmarital romantic relationship dissolution: A meta-analytic synthesis. Personal Relationships 17, 3 (Sept. 2010), 377--390.
21. Marlow, C., Byron, L., Lento, T., and Rosenn, I. Maintained relationships on Facebook, 2009. On-line at On-line at http://overstated.net/2009/03/09/maintained-relationships-on-facebook The cited figures and results from this work, including Figure 1, are reproduced with permission in the book Networks, Crowds, and Markets (D. Easley and J. Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press, 2010.).
22. Marsden, P. V., and Campbell, K. E. Measuring tie stength. Social Forces 63, 2 (Dec. 1984), 482--501.
23. McAuley, J. J., and Leskovec, J. Learning to discover social circles in ego networks. In Proc. 25th Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2012), 548--556.
24. McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., and Brashears, M. E. Social isolation in America: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades. American Sociological Review 71, 3 (June 2006), 353--375.
25. Min, J.-K., Wiese, J., Hong, J. I., and Zimmerman, J. Mining smartphone data to classify life-facets of social relationships. In Proc. 16th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2013). 285--294.
26. Newman, M. E. J. The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review 45\ (2003), 167--256.
27. Onnela, J.-P., Saramaki, J., Hyvonen, J., Szabo, G., Lazer, D., Kaski, K., Kertesz, J., and Barabasi, A.-L. Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104 (2007), 7332--7336.
28. Zhao, X., Sosik, V. S., and Cosley, D. It's complicated: how romantic partners use Facebook. In Proc. 30th ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (2012), 771--780.

Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications