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Mario L. Small, Ph.D., is Quetelet Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. A University of Bremen Excellence Chair, and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Sociological Research Association, Small has published award-winning articles and books on urban inequality, personal networks, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. His books include Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life -- both of which received the C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book -- and Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice, which received the James Coleman Best Book Award among other honors. His most recent books are the co-edited, Personal Networks: Classic Readings and New Directions in Egocentric Analysis, whose 50 contributors provide a compendium of person-centered social network research, and the co-authored Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research, which provides strategies for assessing qualitative research from an empirical perspective. Small is currently studying the relationship between networks and decision-making, the ability of large-scale data to answer critical questions about urban inequality, and the relation between qualitative and quantitative methods
The Avoidance of Strong Ties
The Avoidance of Strong Ties
Social theorists have long proposed that a value of close friends and family—strong ties—is the ability to confide in them when facing personal issues. But close relationships are also complicated in nature, and recent studies have reported people at times avoiding those they are close to when facing personal issues. How common is such avoidance in practice? This question is important to not only theoretical debates over the nature of “closeness” but also social concerns over how socially isolated Americans are today. We develop an approach to answer the question and apply it using new nationally representative data. We find that avoidance is so common as to be fundamental to close relations: when facing personal difficulties, the average adult American is as likely to avoid as to talk to those they consider their closest friends and family. Most avoidance is not reflected on but dispositional, and, contrary to common belief, is not limited to either specific network members or particular topics, depending instead on the conjunction of the member and the topic. These patterns are not fundamentally altered by conditions such as how embarrassing or secret the topic is, the demographic characteristics of ego or alters, or the characteristics of ego’s network, though several of these conditions help predict the probability of avoidance. We propose a theory of the role of institutional mediation in personal networks to account for these patterns. We suggest that there is no more empirical justification for labeling strong ties as those who are trusted than labeling them as those who are avoided. In turn, isolation may be less a matter of having no intimates than of having to avoid them for many of the matters that concern us.
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