Kevin Lewis
Kevin Lewis (University of California San Diego)
Kevin Lewis is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.A. in sociology and philosophy (mathematics minor) from UC San Diego and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. His research focuses on the formation and evolution of social networks, the principles of human interaction that produce global network patterns, and the implications of these processes for the genesis and reproduction of inequality. To address these topics, he has analyzed a number of large-scale network datasets—spanning topics such as online dating, Internet activism, and college students' behavior on Facebook—and although his research has relied heavily on online data sources, he is less interested in the Internet per se than in understanding what these “digital footprints” tell us about society and human interaction more broadly. His work has been published in a variety of sociological and interdisciplinary journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sociological Science, and Social Networks.
Agency and structure in the genesis of network segregation
Relationship data are generally static; human interactions are not. Because of this discrepancy, it is challenging to distinguish observed patterns in relational data from the underlying processes that generate them. In this paper, I examine the genesis of one such pattern—homogeneity, or interpersonal segregation—using a large dataset of online dating site interactions. Unlike past research on established partnerships, I focus on the first moments of contact between strangers. First, even within this narrow empirical window, I document incipient patterns of segregation by race, income, education, and religion. Second, I disambiguate patterns and in-group preferences and find that inferences about the latter are highly contingent on a variety of (typically unacknowledged) methodological decisions. Third, I provide an integrated portrait of how choices vary among different categories of users in different structural positions and at different moments of interaction—and draw on these results to illustrate the complex interplay of choice and constraint that undergirds mating decisions.