As Foner (1999) explained, “Kinship ties are an effective way to cope with uncertainty and economic scarcity.” Granovetter (1973) defined the “strength” of an interpersonal tie as being a function of the “amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” Individuals build and cultivate both strong and weak interper...

Using social capital theory, this study of 194 dating couples examined the connection between parents’ approval of the dating relationship (reported by each couple member for his/her own parents and the partner’s parents) and participants’ relationship distress. The Actor-Partner-Interdependence Model within Structural Equation Modeling served as the data-analytic tool. Results showed that, in ...

Recent years have seen a surge of research on social recommendation techniques for improving recommender systems due to the growing influence of social networks to our daily life. The intuition of social recommendation is that users tend to show affinities with items favored by their social ties due to social influence. Despite the extensive studies, no existing work has attempted to distinguis...

The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the family and the love and respect that children need to have for their parents for over 70 countries. We show that strong family ties imply more reliance on the family as an economic unit which provi...

While the idea that contacts matter in finding a job is intuitively appealing, we still do not know-after decades of research-how and why strong ties benefit job seekers. To resolve this confusion, we need to theorize how specific characteristics of ties are related to the mechanisms that make job search through contacts effective. We have reasons to expect that, while a contact's motivation in...

Complex problem solving in science, engineering, and business has become a highly collaborative endeavor. Teams of scientists or engineers collaborate on projects using their social networks to gather new ideas and feedback. Here we bridge the literature on team performance and information networks by studying teams' problem solving abilities as a function of both their within-team networks and...

In this paper, we explore the idea of weak ties in networked learning. We go back to the original conception of the strength of weak ties (Granovetter 1973) and relate this to a dialogic understanding of networked learning (Koschmann 1999, Dysthe 2002). These theoretical ideas are applied to the examination of two networked settings in which educational leaders exchange ideas and have the poten...

Network topology and its relationship to tie strengths may hinder or enhance the spreading of information in social networks. We study the correlations between tie strengths and topology in networks of scientific collaboration, and show that these are very different from ordinary social networks. For the latter, it has earlier been shown that strong ties are associated with dense network neighb...

We show that three basic actor characteristics, namely normalized reciprocity, three cycles, and triplets, can be expressed using an unified framework that is based on computing the similarity index between two sets associated with the actor: the set of her/his friends and the set of those considering her/him as a friend. These metrics are extended to multiplex networks and then computed for tw...