Sociology Seminar: Thursdays

Time: 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm –
Date: 26th of January 2022
Place: 3105

Lucas Drouhot (Utrecht University) “Integration or fragmentation ? Cultural diversity and friendship networks among European adolescents”

Abstract : Does diversity lead to social fragmentation or integration? This question animates recent research on ethnic homophily – the tendency to form relationships with others of similar national origins. While national origins seems like a reasonable proxy for subjectively felt commonality underlying ethnic homophily, we deem it implausible that friendship ties are shaped by such “passport homophily” in practice. Based on data from hundreds of classroom friendship networks in four European countries, we find that national origins diversity is indeed entangled with linguistic and religious diversity. We fit ERG models for friendship ties across ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. Through a random-effects meta-regression analysis, we show that ethnic and linguistic homophily similarly peak around moderate levels of ethnic and linguistic diversity. Religious homophily, by contrast, increases linearly with religious diversity. Overall, these results point to a divergence in tie formation mechanisms embedded in elementary differences between major domains of cultural difference.

Sofian EL ATIFI, Etienne OLLION, Patrick PRÄG (Pôle de Sociologie du CREST)
Sponsors :
CREST