Investigating How Social Networks Adapt To Mobile Societies - Combining Egocentric & Complete Network Analyses

虽然我们日益全球化的世界为我们提供了接触新的、多样化的人的机会，但我们更加流动的生活也带来了挑战，比如融入新的社交网络，与那些看起来与我们非常不同的人互动。因为有证据表明，我们朋友圈的规模和凝聚力预测了我们应对社会和环境压力的能力，这种流动性也会让我们更脆弱。然而，对于我们如何使我们的社交网络适应不稳定的环境和高会员流动率，我们知之甚少。通过跟踪学生在12个月内从中学到大学的转变，我正在调查搬迁如何影响个人的个人或以自我为中心的社会网络。通过注册牛津学院的大部分新生，我可以进一步研究一个由临时成员组成的独立完整的网络是如何形成的。参与的学生首先提供有关自己的人口统计信息，并完成一份简短的性格评估。然后，他们每隔三个月填写一份扩展的社交网络问卷，详细说明他们列出的网络成员的关系类型、情感亲密度、身体接近度、典型的互动方式以及种族和国籍。除了捕捉参与者的自我中心网络及其构成外，在每个数据收集阶段还包括一系列心理健康评估。通过追踪学生们经历的思乡、孤独和焦虑，我可以将网络的变化与他们的心理健康联系起来。此外，它还可以显示性格相似或情绪状态相似的人是否更倾向于在一起建立友谊。此外，我计划整合社交媒体数据，使学生的在线社交网络活动可访问，使我能够更连续地获取数据，从而更高效，有效和可靠地观察互动。由于绝大多数牛津学院的新生都被录取了，我将能够进一步研究以前的陌生人是如何发展成一个紧密联系的社区的，从而跟踪一个完整网络的进展，除了记录每个学生以自我为中心的网络变化。将这两种方法结合起来，将对社交网络的形成和变化产生独特的见解。鉴于我们的现代社会面临着大规模移民和普遍下降的心理健康，这些发现可能具有广泛的影响。

While our increasingly globalised world offers opportunities for contact with new and diverse people, our more mobile lives also involve challenges, such as integrating into new social networks and interacting with those who might appear very different from us. Since evidence shows that the size and cohesiveness of our friendship circles predict how well we cope with social and environmental stress, this mobility can also make us more vulnerable.However, little is known about how we adapt our social networks to less stable environments with high membership turnover. By following students' transitions from secondary school to university over 12 months, I am investigating how relocation affects individuals' personal, or egocentric, social networks. By signing up most of the incoming student cohort of one Oxford College, I can additionally examine how a new self-contained complete network made up of temporary members forms. Participating students initially supply demographic information about themselves and complete a short personality assessment. They then fill out an extended social network questionnaire at three-month intervals, specifying the type of relationship, emotional closeness, physical proximity, typical means of interaction as well as the ethnicity and nationality for each of their listed network members. Moving beyond capturing participants' egocentric networks and their compositions, a range of mental health assessments is also included at each data collection stage.Tracing the students' experienced homesickness, loneliness and anxiousness will allow me to relate network changes to their mental health. Moreover, it enables showing whether people of similar personalities or comparable emotional states preferentially form friendships together. Additionally, I plan on incorporating social media data that will make the student's online social network activities accessible, allowing me to obtain data more continuously and to thus observe interactions much more efficiently, effectively and reliably.Due to the vast majority of all incoming students within one Oxford College being recruited, I will be able to further examine how former strangers develop into a close-knit community and thus to follow the progression of a complete network in addition to recording each student's egocentric network changes.Combining these two approaches will generate unique insights into how social networks form and change. Given that our modern societies face mass immigration and generally declining psychological health, these findings have potentially wide-ranging implications.