It has been a challenge to understand the formation and roles of social groups or natural communities in the evolution of species, societies and real world networks. Here, we propose the hypothesis that homophyly/kinship is the intrinsic mechanism of natural communities, introduce the notion of the affinity exponent and propose the homophyly/kinship model of networks. We demonstrate that the ne...

Five key problems of kinship networks are boundedness, cohesion, size and cohesive relinking, types of relations and relinking, and groups or roles. Approaches to solving these problems include formats available for electronic storage of genealogical data and representations of genealogies using graphs. P-graphs represent couples and uncoupled children as vertices, whereas parent-child links ar...

This article, one of a series, approaches the topics of marriage and kinship through a revitalized kinetic structural approach that shifts the primary focus from abstract models of rules, terminologies, attitudes and norms to exploration of concrete relations in a population, analyzed graph-theoretically in their full complexity as networks. Network representation using the graphe de parenté (s...

Kinship shapes female social networks in many primate populations in which females remain in their natal group to breed. In contrast, it is unclear to which extent kinship affects the social networks in populations with female dispersal. Female Colobus vellerosus show routine facultative dispersal (i.e., some females remain philopatric and others disperse). This dispersal pattern allowed us to ...

This overview of the development of the multilevel network approach to kinship has at its core the definition of a multilevel network as one in which a node at one level may contain a network of relations at the next level (Harary and Batell 1981). The definition is potentially recursive so as to define a particular kind of system, a network with potentially many levels. André Weil (1949), for ...

A study on psychosocial care among Karo (patrilineal kinship) and Minangkabau (matrilineal kinship) households who lived in Jakarta, Indonesia was aimed at investigating psychosocial care practices of mothers and the relation of psychosocial care to the nutritional status of children aged 6-36 months as indicated by Weight-for-Age (WFA), Weight-for-Height (WFH), and Height-for-Age (HFA) Z-score...

Using nationally representative data from the 2012 and 2014 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, this paper investigates effects of network types (kinship/non-kinship) resources (information/influence) on job attainment match quality in China. We find a wage premium obtained through both kinship non- networks but shorter duration only jobs non-kinship networks. In regards to different networks, e...

Confusions between substantive and relational concepts of kinship as a social network have led to a number of problems that are clarified by a temporally ordered relational theory of network structure. The ordered-network approach gives rise to a novel means of graphing the social field of kinship relations, while allowing kinship to be locally defined in culturally relative terms. Its utility ...

Stable social organization in a wide variety of organisms has been linked to kinship, which can minimize conflict due to the indirect fitness benefits from cooperating with relatives. In birds, kin selection has been mostly studied in the context of reproduction or in species that are social year round. Many birds however are migratory, and the role of kinship in the winter societies of these s...