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

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.