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Context Overlap in Personal Networks: Are ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Two Separate Worlds?

In sociology, it is suggested that grand changes in the structure of Western societies in the 19th and 20th centuries led to a decrease in the overlap among social contexts. This implies that people meet the members of their network in many different social contexts. This study inquires into this overlap between social contexts. In particular, we study overlaps between public and private contexts, because modernization-based arguments indicate the increased importance of public contexts at the cost of private contexts but at the same time predict that these contexts will become less ‘bundled’. Next, we analyze the extent to which context overlap is different for various social groups, thereby specifically focusing on who connects private and public contexts. We use data from the Survey on the Social Networks of the Dutch. These data were collected in 2007 and include detailed information on the personal networks of a representative sample of the Dutch population between 25 and 72 years of age. Our major finding is that public contexts hardly overlap with each other, whereas there is considerable overlap between private and public contexts and between the various private contexts. In particular, we show that the largest overlaps are with people’s homes, indicating that, presently, the structure of (intimate) personal networks is primarily determined by co-visitation at home.

Posted in: Journal Article Abstracts on 04/29/2011 | Link to this post on IFP |
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