Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Strength of Long Ties

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40 years since the pioneering work of sociologist, Mark Granovetter, on the "strength of weak ties," numerous studies have confirmed his counter-intuitive thesis that individuals are more likely to acquire novel information from an acquaintance who bridges long network distances than from a close friend. Although the importance of bridge ties for diffusion has been well documented, the focus has primarily been on comparing the relational strength of ties embedded in tightly knit circles vs. the relational strength of ties that bridge long network distances, rather than examining tie strengths of bridge ties that span varying network distances. Drawing on population-scale data from Twitter and other social/communication networks, this project will (a) test the proposition that bridging ties tend to be weaker with the network distance they span, (b) develop an explanation for the relationship between the strength and span-length of bridging ties using statistical and simulation approaches, and (c) further explore the variation in these relationships across countries of different cultures and economic development. This study will contribute to research across the social sciences, including studies of diffusion and contagion, network evolution, social capital, and labor market processes. The development and dissemination of effective methods to collect, analyze, and compare multiple networks constituted by hundreds of millions of individuals will contribute to the social science community that primarily relied on survey-based egocentric network data. The project will also contribute to graduate training on the use of distributed and parallel cloud-computing tools for studying population-scale social networks