Conference Agenda

While numerous studies have focused on remittances from diaspora communities, particularly in West Africa, few have examined Guinean migrants, and even fewer have quantitatively described the relationships underpinning these solidarities. Yet, like its neighbors, Guinea experiences massive emigration of its nationals, not only to other African countries but also to other parts of the world. This emigration often serves as a source of financial support for locals, with 61.7% of my respondents reporting receiving monetary assistance from a relative living abroad.

This study aims to analyze the financial transfers from the Guinean diaspora by examining the "personal networks" of a sample of 978 residents in the Conakry metropolitan area. The survey employs "name generators," in which respondents are asked to list individuals within their social circles. One specific question required them to name people from whom they receive financial support, both locally and from abroad.

Far from being a unique form of solidarity, I argue that these financial transfers represent a continuation of local solidarities in a context where state-driven solidarity is lacking. Furthermore, research on remittances often focuses on fund providers. By analyzing personal networks, my study offers a perspective on remittances from the Guinean diaspora through the experiences of beneficiaries who remain in the country.

Purpose: This presentation addresses the methodological challenges of collecting longitudinal personal network data in rural Romanian communities, aiming to capture the dynamics of social networks over time.

Methods: We conducted a two-wave panel study in a rural Romanian community (N = 4,124). In the first wave (September 2023), 83 egos and 1,970 alters were surveyed using a fixed-name generator (n = 25 alters). The second wave (March 2024) included 94 egos and 1,513 alters, utilizing a free-name generator (average = 16 alters). Sixty-eight egos participated in both waves. Alters were tracked using unique identification codes; inconsistencies were resolved by cross-referencing demographic and relational attributes without imputation. A link-tracing sampling method was employed, starting from six seeds with a variable number of recommendations per participant.

Contributions: Our findings highlight the effectiveness of combining fixed and free-name generators to reduce respondent burden and improve data quality in longitudinal personal network studies. We also discuss the challenges of modeling multiple network data dependencies and outline plans to replicate this research design in Bulgaria's Plovdiv region. This work contributes to advancing cross-cultural panel PNA methodologies, particularly in underrepresented rural Eastern European contexts, and offers insights for evaluating community-level public health interventions aimed at cancer prevention.

Sociological theories suggest that interpersonal relationships and social ties are influenced by broader societal structures and cultural contexts. Traditionally, this process has been studied through the lens of individualization, observing how modern societal structures—such as markets and technological change—encourage diverse, geographically dispersed, and specialized relationships beyond family or local community. This paper provides an international comparative analysis, examining personal networks in France, China, and Guinea. Despite numerous national studies, international comparisons remain scarce due to methodological inconsistencies. Our approach relies on three surveys conducted with the same name-generator methodology: A survey in Toulouse, France (709 respondents, in 2017), Chongqing, China survey (650 respondents, in 2018) and Conakry, Guinea survey (944 respondents, in 2019)

Results reveal both similarities and significant differences: family ties are more prevalent in China and Guinea, while Toulouse respondents maintain more geographically and emotionally distant relationships. Neighborhood ties notably dominate in Conakry. Structurally, networks in China and France show similarities despite a distinct role for partners, whereas Guinea's networks are denser and more interconnected. These variations in social network composition and structure reflect differences in economic conditions and institutional stability, including market structures and welfare systems.

We present an analysis of the impact of the number of alters elicited in an ego network on the structural properties of those networks. There continues to be debate about the pros and cons of eliciting a fixed number of alters. This article explores a random assignment of respondents to three treatment groups – 1) a fixed number of alters set at 30, 2) a variable number of alters up to 45, and 3) a variable number of alters up to 45 with a 20 alter minimum. The results indicate that, from a non-structural perspective, all levels of emotional proximity, interaction contexts, genders, and ages are consistently sampled across the three name generators. At the structural level, the behavior of individual metrics is also largely similar. However, the most significant differences arise in the collective behavior of structural metrics—specifically, in their correlation structure and the diversity and interpretability of the observed structural variability. When a name generator constrains network size, it reduces the sparsity of the correlation matrix, effectively decreasing the number of independent global variables needed to describe network structure and making these global variables less interpretable. In other words, networks constructed with a name generator that limits size tend to be more similar to each other, exhibiting less structural diversity and yielding differences that are harder to interpret. However, we discuss how these differences may simply be mathematical artifacts, without necessarily implying a clear advantage in choosing one name generator over another.

The perception of culture influences learning and reinforcement of actions from individuals as parts of society. The individuals’ interactions, captured in personal networks, might reflect unique cultural properties. We are building a database for comparing structural characteristics of personal networks with cultural diversity. This work is the first stage of a global data collection across ten countries. Our survey-based data collection is twofold. First, the participants construct their personal network with a fixed-choice name generator. They name and describe their alters, including alter-alter connections, and further evaluate the perceived social norms in their country. Second, we follow an innovative approach and request the participants to donate their Data Download Packages from Facebook and/or Instagram, which contains all their digital traces on those platforms. This rich data set enables us to draw comparisons between cultural features and the personal network structure, between the personal network and the online social network, and also between the two online social networks Facebook and Instagram. With insights from over 600 participants in Mexico and Romania, we examine the prevalence of personal network types and approximate structural differences between the two countries. Moreover, we link cultural features of Mexico and Romania, such as Mary Douglas’ Grid/Group dimensions, to network properties. Finally, linking culture diversity and structural characteristics of personal networks uncovers new perspectives across various social disciplines. This extends to social challenges, such as fostering more integrative societies, informing about the structural characteristics for integrating new members of society from other cultural backgrounds.