The “strength of weak ties” has been established in the context labour market outcomes, with theoretical and empirical investigation showing how ties lead to an increase mobility job opportunities. impact on community organisation is less well understood. We contribute this literature by investigating if ties, generated via membership livelihood programmes, can creation or enhancement social ca...

Social network research seldom considers the possible effect of individual psychological differences on network structures. We propose several hypotheses about how individual differences might predispose actors to structure their immediate social environment in terms of seeking network closure or a preparedness to sustain structural holes. To investigate these hypotheses, we introduce a new met...

We examine the effect of individual psychological differences on network structures, proposing several hypotheses about how individual differences might predispose actors to structure their social environment by seeking network closure or by sustaining structural holes. We introduce a new triad census method to examine personal networks of strong and weak ties. For 125 egocentric networks we co...

Abstract Research on social networks of immigrants and their descendants usually starts from the distinction between ‘ethnic’ ties to members population without migration background. In studies are repeatedly associated with ‘strong ties’, whereas ‘weak ties’ – that found be essential for access jobs in wider society contacts ‘majority population’. Building existing criticism this narrowing dic...

The human brain is organized in functional modules. Such an organization presents a basic conundrum: Modules ought to be sufficiently independent to guarantee functional specialization and sufficiently connected to bind multiple processors for efficient information transfer. It is commonly accepted that small-world architecture of short paths and large local clustering may solve this problem. H...

The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Recent research on “small worlds” shows that remarkably few long ties are needed to give large and highly clustered populations the “degrees of separation” of a random network, in which information can rapidly diffuse. We test whether this effect of long ties generalizes from simple to complex cont...

The study reported here examines characteristics of weak-tie support network preference among members of health-related computer-mediated support groups. Drawing on weak-tie support network theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, participants’ age and health condition were assessed as predictors of weak ties support network preference. Relationships between the dimensions of weak-tie supp...