Is Britain pulling apart? Analysis of generational change in social distances

Daily life in Britain has changed in many important ways over recent decades. There have been longer-running demographic trends such as longer life expectancy and increased participation in education. Concurrently, independent adult living has increased. Routinely, people will have had other cohabiting partners before settling with a long term partner; will marry later than they would have in earlier decades; and will divorce or remarry more often. Patterns of fertility have also changed, first births occur later, and families have fewer children than in previous generations. Coupled with these demographic changes there have been notable developments in long-distance travel and, more recently, increased long-distance communication through electronic means (especially the internet). Taken together these changes may have substantial influence on patterns of social interaction in contemporary social life.

In this project we seek to paint a picture of social life in Britain through comprehensive empirical analyses of patterns in the 'social distance' between people. By social distance we mean the closeness (or distance) between different people who have connections to each other (such as family members or friends). We conjecture that changes in social distance are a useful barometer of social change.

Trends in social distance have sometimes been neglected within empirical sociological enquiries. This has partially been due to the lack of suitable data or the complexities of analysing data on linked individuals. Britain's exceptional resources in large-scale, longitudinal surveys, along with recent methodological innovations for the analysis of data on social connections, mean that it is now plausible to propose systematic analyses of trends in social distance using large-scale representative survey data.

In contemporary societies social connections are important because they provide essential economic, social and psychological support. Social connections also help to shape individual attitudes, values and expectations. In many areas of social science, there is growing recognition that to comprehensively understand an individual's circumstances, we need to know more about the circumstances of those in their networks (i.e. their 'nearest and dearest'). Understanding patterns of social distance can therefore offer major insights into the composition of contemporary social structures.

In the proposed analyses we are interested in exploring a wide range of different domains that are indicative of changes (or stability) in social distance. This will be a unique departure from conventional approaches that concentrate on standard socio-economic outcomes. The wide spectrum of these domains includes the connections between the political values and opinions of related people, through to their patterns of health and use of support services.

Social distance trends on certain socio-economic measures have been studied in sociology and economics. Typically the focus of empirical studies has been upon either educational or occupational similarity (or homophily), or upon intergenerational associations. Large-scale surveys have not been fully exploited to assess the diverse aspects of social distance in an integrated manner. Therefore the proposed project is intellectually innovative.

Funding is requested to support one full time researcher and the three investigators in a coordinated set of analyses oriented towards at least four publication objectives. The research fellow has appropriate pre-existing expertise in working with data on social connections and applying advanced statistical methods to social connections data. The proposed project builds directly upon previous ESRC supported activities which focussed upon analysing social networks and occupational data. The research will provide a solid empirical platform upon which theoretical claims about changing social circumstances in Britain can be formally tested.

The project plans a number of activities designed to promote its research to wider audiences in a productive way. Strategies including dissemination plans and network engagement are noted in 'Pathways to Impact'. We argue that policy oriented audiences should in particular gain from what we hope will be accessible outputs from an important sociological topic. Examples of target communities could include local and national government policymakers, and 'think tanks', social justice and equality charities, and lobbying groups.

This research will be timely in terms of both feeding into contemporary social debates on social segregation/integration, and also emerging academic debates around homophily. Social integration and segregation are important issues in contemporary society, and there is much press coverage of the extent to which certain ethnic and religious groups are integrating (cf. Finney and Simpson 2009). Previous research has rarely achieved representative analysis of the multiple factors which can shape interaction patterns and their various consequences; the current project has an exciting opportunity to develop high quality empirical evidence on this complex topic.

We believe that by mapping structures of social distance we can gain a more thorough understanding of the social distance between groupings which may have policy implications in many domains (such as regarding ethnicity, immigration, religion, disability). Our methods will enable us to develop, from statistical representations of the social distance between groupings, comparisons which could be more easily understood by the wider public. We may be able to describe trends, for instance, by arguing that the difference between two social groups was previously like the difference between Guardian and Sun readers, but is now more like the gap between Guardian and Times readers (for example). Indeed, by mapping the social interaction structure, the study will enable a more refined and nuanced description of social ties between groups. This will enable existing attention to of social integration and segregation to be informed improved measures of distance, and measures of relative social inclusion should be generated which can improve upon the simpler data (on proportions of social groups) which is currently widely used.

Key outcomes influenced by social connections will also be analysed. Examples of important topics that we will be able to assess include: the effects of family members' illnesses or health patterns on longer-term health, social or career outcomes; whether political or social attitudes of social contacts correlate to socio-economic outcomes or aspirations; and the impact of social contacts' religious or cultural positions on values including health behaviours. We believe there is much potential further scope for future analyses of social distance patterns, and therefore one of the aims of the research will be to promote a wider programme of research and disseminate our methods to the wider academic audience to facilitate further adoption of our methods.

By demonstrating use of secondary data to study social distance, the project will showcase the substantive contributions of major ESRC research resources to a wider audience. A key input involves illustrating how a household design such as that of the BHPS means we can not only measure homophily amongst cohabiters, but can additionally analyse whether people have gone on to live with people similar to themselves or similar to other members of their previous home, helping us for instance to understand more about the stability or change in individuals' interaction patterns.