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This chapter describes the design and structure of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of over 90,000 adolescents attending school in the United States. Add Health employs a clustered, school-based sample that allows for the collection of extensive social and romantic network data from students attending the same schools. All students within a school were surveyed, so the within-school friendship networks are complete. The chapter reviews the study design, the fieldwork experience, the measurement of network characteristics, and concludes by presenting a sampling of findings from studies using the network data in Add Health.

This chapter examines how and why segregation remains in high school classrooms even as students in the post-Brown era are able to select their own program of study. It describes the placement processes of six North Carolina high schools and recounts how a racially mixed group of sixty-one students attending those schools went about choosing their courses. The analysis shows how students make sense of the messages about race and academic achievement that are communicated through institutional practices such as racialized tracking and gifted identification and placement. The chapter also assesses the consequences of this meaning-making for students' developing sense of self, their friendship networks, and their school-based decisions. The findings reveal how schools' early sorting of students helps steer them toward particular programs of study, which also helps shape their friendship networks. Students, in turn, base their course decisions on a combination of subjective criteria: their interpretation of the meaning of their prior placement and achievement experiences, and their understanding of where they fit within both the intellectual pecking order and the social networks of their school.

Questions whether the legal provision of mediation is indicative of the decreasing ability of the family to settle marital discord. Shows how these households exemplify the decreasing strength of family ties in general and the diminishing ability of the family to negotiate a settlement in cases of marital disputes in particular; and whether, in the absence of family, friends take up roles of support and care.

A discussion of social networks and methods for determining their structure. The chapter starts with a brief description of social networks, broadly defined, and the history of their study. Several methods for measuring social networks are discussed, including survey instruments such as interviews and questionnaires, direct observation, and archival or historical data. Also discussed are Milgram's small-world experiment and snowball sampling techniques.

This chapter addresses women's relationships with members of their kinship and friendship networks. This was the arena in which women trusted people the most. Many women considered family members and friends priceless allies. Still distrust was present. Some friends and family members used drugs and alcohol to excess, others promised to take care of children but went out to party instead, while others constantly asked for money or food or, worse yet, took it without asking. Women who felt they could not trust network members went to great lengths to keep such people out of their lives and away from their children. Untrustworthy network members not only represented a lost source of potential support but could drain households of resources, time, and peacefulness. The chapter also explores whether the kinds of resources that kinship and friendship networks provide women have changed since welfare reform.

This chapter outlines the available approaches to understanding and interpreting local population change, in the context of government policy for community cohesion. It first addresses the claims that residential segregation is dangerous and friendship networks are polarised. The chapter then describes the existing advice on local demographic monitoring and provides further practical guidance to assist policy makers in developing the necessary contextual information for the evaluation of local initiatives. The ethnic composition of neighbourhoods and friendship networks still taxes the popular image of successful communities, and stimulates academic and government concerns. The importance of monitoring population composition in order to understand change has been repeatedly claimed but remains a gap in practice. Neighbourhood population studies do provide an essential context for policies of social cohesion, and suffer from a lack of updated information between Censuses of Population.

Computer simulations have long been used as an effective tool in engineering, economics, psychology, and a number of other social sciences. Engineers typically use simulations to predict performance of a system that has known dynamic characteristics. These characteristics are typically obtained from theory and are then articulated in the simulation as difference or differential equations. The goal of engineering simulation is then to assess the dynamic performance of a system based on a priori knowledge of the dynamic relationships among the various elements of the system. Forrester (1961, 1973) was one of the earliest and most influential advocates of simulation modeling of dynamic social systems. Forrester advocated this approach as a way to model and assess the dynamics of industrial and world phenomena. Sterman (2000) provides a recent review of research on dynamics simulation from this tradition. While this approach has produced a considerable number of studies, it too is based on the assumption that the researcher has a priori knowledge of the dynamic relationships among elements of the system. Indeed, many of the results of these models have been criticized for specifying relationships that were at best untested and at worst flawed. In response to these criticisms, more recent interest has focused on redefining the utility of simulations in the social sciences. Rather than using simulations to test the long-term dynamics of systems with known interrelationships, theorists (Carley & Prietula, 1994; Contractor, 1994; Hanneman, 1988) have suggested that social scientists should use simulations to help construct theory, to identify the heretofore-unknown interrelationships. This section describes the traditional use of computer simulations as well as the adaptation of this approach toward theory construction and testing in the social sciences. Later sections will apply these general approaches to the computational modeling of networks in particular. Carley and Prietula (1994) suggest that the emergence of the new field of computational organizational theory (COT) signals the growing interest in the construction of computational models to augment and assist theory building. Most social science theories are richly evocative but highly abbreviated (Poole, 1997), that is, they offer explanations that suggest complex interrelationships but do not provide precise, falsifiable mathematical formalizations of the theory.

This chapter discusses three families of theoretical mechanisms—homophily, proximity (physical and electronic), and social support—that have been identified by social scientists as important motivations for why we create, maintain, dissolve, and reconstitute our communication networks. While much of this research is conducted in nonorganizational settings, this chapter focuses on the theory and research that we consider to be most germane to communication and other organizational networks. Several researchers have attempted to explain communication networks on the basis of homophily, that is, the selection of others who are similar. Brass (1995a, p. 51) notes that “similarity is thought to ease communication, increase predictability of behavior, and foster trust and reciprocity.” Homophily has been studied on the basis of similarity in age, gender, education, prestige, social class, tenure, and occupation (Carley, 1991; Coleman, 1957; Ibarra, 1993b, 1995; Laumann, 1966; Marsden, 1988; McPherson & Smith-Lovin, 1987). Several lines of reasoning provide support for the homophily hypothesis. These fall into two general categories: the similarity-attraction hypothesis (Byrne, 1971) and the theory of self-categorization (Turner, 1987). The similarity-attraction hypothesis is exemplified in the work of Heider (1958) who posited that homophily reduces the psychological discomfort that may arise from cognitive or emotional inconsistency. Similarly, Sherif (1958) suggested that individuals were more likely to select similar others because by doing so they reduce the potential areas of conflict in the relationship. The theory of self-categorization (Turner & Oakes, 1986) suggests that individuals define their social identity through a process of self-categorization during which they classify themselves and others using categories such as age, race, gender. Schachter (1959) argued that similarity provided individuals with a basis for legitimizing their own social identity. The manner in which individuals categorize themselves influences the extent to which they associate with others who are seen as falling into the same category. It is easy to see that the theoretical mechanism by which homophily influences the likelihood of a communication relation is based on the similarity among specific attributes of the actors.