Major life events (MLEs) can have substantial impacts on people’s social networks. Deaths, illnesses, job changes, and life-course transitions can alter people’s personal social networks. In this paper we explore the effects of MLEs on college student networks at an elite 4-year U.S. residential university. Do MLEs lead to changes in who is in a person’s networks (turnover) while the overall structure (size, clustering, modularity) remains the same? Alternatively, are there also structural changes and if so, are these changes temporary or permanent? We begin to answer these questions by looking at the impact of MLEs on turnover and one important network property, ego network size (nodal degree). Using time-stamped communication event data collected during the NetHealth study of 600+ first year college students over 2-4 years, we construct for each day a student’s personal network. From these networks we compute daily measures of degree, and counts of new, dead and active ties which are used to construct turnover and growth measures. Most students experience an MLE during their college tenure, with the most frequent MLEs being deaths, breakups and illnesses/surgeries. Using a quasi-experimental before-after design, we compare those who experienced an MLE to those who did not by looking at turnover and network size changes from the semester before, during and after an MLE. We examine whether MLE effects are more prevalent within certain demographic groups and for various types of MLEs (positive vs. negative, individual vs. familial, illness vs. relationship breakup).

Having studied the interpersonal networks of the Hungarian adult population over the past three decades, we would like to provide a brief overview of our results, overwhelmingly based on cross-sectional data, which unfortunately do not permit the examination of individual-level changes. However, we have plenty of information collected with the same methods regarding the core discussion networks, the number of friends and weak ties and also several waves of interviews, especially regarding friendships – and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. In our presentation we would like to discuss what kinds of conclusions can we possibly have, based on such data series.

By analyzing Dutch kinship network data from Statistics Netherlands, this study provides a detailed enumeration of kinship ties to grandchildren, children, nieces, nephews, siblings, cousins, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in 2018. In doing so, it replicates the recent work of Kolk et al. (2023), who examined Swedish kinship networks. However, empirical assessments beyond the Swedish context are complicated by exceptionally high data requirements. This study examines whether Kolk et al.’s (2023) Swedish findings are generalizable to another demographically advanced population, the Netherlands, and whether differences in cohort fertility patterns and divorce rates affect the frequencies of different kin types. First, we identified large similarities, supporting the idea that the patterns observed by Kolk et al. (2023) may indeed be generalized to other demographically advanced (Western) contexts. Second, we observed a trickling down of demographic differences—resulting from the Dutch baby boom—from one generation to the next. Third, other family-related behavioral changes, particularly separation and divorce, play an important role in shaping kinship networks and contributing to cross-national differences in their composition. Our replication highlights the importance of empirically validating kinship statistics derived from microsimulations and aggregate demographic data. Further research is needed to track these dynamics over longer time spans and to explore a broader range of cultural and demographic contexts.

Background and objectives: Suicide awareness is a critical aspect of primary suicide prevention, especially among youth. Suicide awareness includes key characteristics such as knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to suicide. Despite its importance, there is limited understanding of how perceived suicide awareness is associated with adolescents’ support networks. This cross-sectional personal network analysis examined the composition of the adolescents’ support network and tested the association of this support network with suicide awareness.

Methods: This study used baseline data from a nonrandomized, cluster-controlled trial designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a universal suicide prevention intervention implemented in secondary schools in Switzerland. The study focused on secondary school classes in the French-speaking region of the country, involving a total of 194 adolescents aged 14 years and older. We assessed perceived suicide awareness (measured by the Perceived Suicide Awareness Scale, PSAS-9), support networks (suing name generator), and sociodemographic details. Data were analyzed using factor analysis to identify support network dimensions and linear regressions.

Results: Our findings showed that support networks are organized with 4 factors. On the first factors, parents have high loadings; on the second factors, grandparents have high loadings, on the third factor, uncles and aunts have high loadings, and on the fourth factor, friends have high loadings. Controlling for sociodemographic factors, factors three and four were significantly associated with a higher suicide awareness (b=0.87, p=.044 and b=1.71, p=.003), while factors one and two were not significantly associated with suicide awareness (b=0.68, p=.148 and b=-0.57, p=.162).

Conclusion: This study showed that perceived suicide awareness in adolescents is significantly associated with specific components of their support networks. These findings suggest that peer relationships and certain extended family connections may play a more influential role in adolescents' suicide awareness than immediate family relationships. Future suicide prevention initiatives should consider the differential impact of various support network components, particularly focusing on extended family members.

This paper investigates territorial variation in youth transitions by providing an exploratory analysis of the welfare mix of young adults (the set of institutions they depend on to establish their means of living: family, state, and market). It examines the ties to a complex social system shaped by multilevel interactions between socioeconomic stratification, personal networks, and welfare state contexts.

The paper analyzes the ch-x dataset, a cross-sectional survey of 79,896 Swiss young adults, concerning both a comprehensive mapping of their networks and socio-demographic indicators on them and their alters. It uses Multiple Factor Analysis (MFA) to map the structure of cantonal youth policy programs, to holistically characterize the social capital of respondents, and to trace relationships to specific welfare mixes.

Preliminary results indicate that under similar policy environments, the welfare mix of young adults is related to their network characteristics. In contexts of high welfare effort and academically oriented education systems, exclusive dependency on parents is related to larger networks and higher career support from alters. Both co-dependency on parents and the market, and exclusive market dependency, are linked to more kin-based and dense networks. Nonetheless, network indicators are not tied to a specific welfare mix in cantons where youth policy is structured around vocational education, as co-dependency between parents and the market is predominant.

The study highlights the relevance of holistically addressing social network indicators to operationalize social capital, as well as considering institutional contexts in shaping the relations between the meso- and micro-levels.

(The contribution is part of an ongoing PhD thesis at UNIGE co-supervised by Eric Widmer and Jean-Michel Bonvin)

Researchers have been interested in value similarities across family members for decades focusing specifically on the similarities between parents and their adolescent children. Adolescence, however, is a relatively short period of time strongly affected by changes and transitions; therefore, similarities observed between teenagers and their parents should not easily be assumed to persist throughout adulthood. To address this research gap, I inspected value similarities of parents and their adult children using data from multiple rounds of the German SOEP. To provide more details concerning the similarities, I inspected the similarities separately for mothers and fathers. I focused on values from three areas: material success, family life, and pro-social behavior. The preliminary results show that differences between mothers and their children, as well as fathers and their children, were the smallest for the importance of being there for others. At the same time, they were largest in terms of the importance of having children. Overall, on average neither parent seemed to be more similar to their child than the other. For some values, like the importance of a successful career, the differences were smaller for fathers; in others, such as the importance of owning a home, they were smaller for mothers. To provide an even wider overview, future analyses might also include intragenerational value similarities, meaning the value differences between parents and between the adult child and their siblings. This will allow additional insight concerning differences due to generational differences in society.

Social life consists of an interweaving of times (Rochabrún, 2021; Bidart, 2013) and relationships between human beings imply time exchanges. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a reorganization of daily life, in particular, to a reconfiguration of the spatiotemporal relations between work and family. Thus, there were tensions and complementarities between work time and family time. In this context, teachers, central actors in educational systems, found themselves “between two fires”: they had to face the tension between the new needs and demands of work and family, which included the occurrence of unexpected biographical events (deaths, illnesses, anxiety, depression, among others).

The present study investigates the links between the temporalities of work and family, and their consequences on the mobilization of personal networks of Peruvian secondary education teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodological design was of a mixed nature (sociometric and qualitative). Two basic forms of relationship between teaching time and family time were found: confluence with displacement and confluence with complementarity. These forms of relationship led teachers to mobilize their personal support networks, which involved mobilizing the time of the members of these networks. This mobilization of time required coordination, but also gave rise to tensions between multiple times: the time of teachers, their partners, their children, their students, and their students’ parents. These results add to the literature on the relationships among personal networks, social support mobilization processes and time.

Forced migration disrupts refugees’ social networks and complicates partnership formation, especially for young refugees at an active partnership-forming age. These challenges are often heightened by skewed sex ratios among co-ethnics. In the absence of network data, little is known about the availability of social networks with romantic potential and the factors shaping such connections. We utilized newly collected ego-centric PARFORM data from Germany (2022–2023) to examine the presence of women in the networks of young male Syrian and Afghan refugees who arrived unmarried between 2014-2018, and whether these connections have the potential to develop into romantic relationships (N=1,139 egos; N=1,655 alters). We employed OLS and linear probability models to explore how the presence of up to three female contacts and potential romantic preference is shaped by three factors: 1) cultural, socio-economic, and personal characteristics of refugees and female contacts, 2) the availability of opportunity structures to meet women, and 3) societal expectations. Findings reveal, first, that male refugees with at least one woman in their social network were, on average, more educated and less religious. They had greater opportunity structures, such as a higher share of male friends and relatives in Germany. Second, among female network contacts—both among co-ethnics and German residents—refugees strongly preferred culturally endogamous women for potential partnerships. To achieve this, they sought online contacts and family advice. These findings suggest that whereas both cultural and socio-economic factors matter for access to female contacts, cultural factors outweigh socio-economic ones in shaping refugees’ romantic preferences.

Family networks are a valuable source of information and support influencing the parenting strategies of first-time parents, especially when it comes to arranging childcare. How family networks shape childcare strategies depends on the complex interplay between the gender, lineage, education, employment, and geographical proximity of available kin, among other factors. However, previous work studying how family networks shape childcare choices focuses on a few of such factors at a time, and often considers only relationships with close kin. We undertake a much more comprehensive empirical test. We adopt a machine learning perspective where we quantify the relevance of family networks in terms of their ability to make out-of-sample predictions of whether first-time parents use formal childcare services in the Netherlands. We leverage population-scale network data for over 200,000 first-time parents derived from administrative registers that allows us to trace the family relationships between all registered residents of the country in 2021. We construct the ego-networks of couples including step- and extended kin, and measure their composition and structure considering the availability of specific types of kin (e.g. maternal aunts), the existence of specific triads and higher-order motifs (e.g. grandmother-aunt-cousin), the generational structure of the network, its geographical dispersion, the educational and employment status of alters, and their care needs and burden. We model the relationship between childcare choices and this large set of predictors using random forest models with bagging and boosting to prevent overfitting, avoid multicollinearity, model non-linearity, and account for interactions between all predictors. By carefully analysing the results, we provide a comprehensive population-scale test of how close and extended kin matter in the transition to parenthood and subsequent childcare arrangements.

This research examines, cross-sectionally, the patterns of resources and strains in personal networks and psychological adjustment in a general population sample of 4000 young men and women in Switzerland, considering the different social markers of the transition to adulthood. We investigated the patterns of support and conflict interdependencies using a typological approach of structural interdependencies, jointly considering both structural features of support and conflict relationships within young adults’ networks. Six patterns of positive and negative interdependencies were identified, with some reflecting bonding and/or bridging types of network-based social capital, which certainly feature the availability of relational resources. However, other patterns, mixing supportive and conflict relationships, reflect more stress and strains than resources. A pattern also features the presence of sparse supportive and conflicting relationships. Our results showed that young adults embedded in personal networks featuring some bonding social capital had lower levels of distress. On the other hand, those integrated in patterns of interdependencies where stressful relationships are over-represented, or those in a pattern of sparse interdependencies, expressed high levels of distress. Our results showed that patterns or resources and strains matter for the mental health of young adults. We also assessed the extent to which such patterns of support and conflict interdependencies related to the social structure and some transition markers. Our results have policy implications in the current context where the increasing complexity of society makes the transition to adulthood increasingly challenging for a significant part of young people.

This study examines the impact of normative and non-normative life course events on the personal networks of young adults. Non-normative life course events, especially interruptions after compulsory education, as well as their number and duration, disrupt chronological age norms. These disruptions, in turn, shape the composition and structure of personal networks in the long term.

Using data from the large-scale, nationally representative survey of young adults in Switzerland (ch-x), collected between 2020 and 2023, this study analyses ego-centered network data from the Personal Networks and Professional Aspirations module. Personal network methods are used to identify the main types of young adults' personal networks and assess their structural properties in relation to social capital.

The results show that young adults who experience normative life events are embedded in large personal networks, consisting of ties to peers and parents. They occupy a central position within these networks, which exhibit high levels of reciprocity and transitivity. In particular, young adults who follow a continuous path through upper secondary education tend to have personal networks with a strong presence of friends, while those following a vocational path are embedded in either family of origin or professional networks.

Conversely, young adults who experience interruptions after compulsory education are more likely to be involved in smaller networks in which they tend to occupy less central positions. These networks are either sparse or mainly composed of extended family members. The results are discussed in the context of cohort solidarity and young adults' collective action.

By conceptualizing migration as a dual-focus process, this presentation advances our understanding of how migrants actively manage relationships across borders, balancing opportunities, and constraints in both settings. Drawing on three datasets—the Catalonia Migrants Survey, the Madrid Ukrainian Panel, and the Normandy Panel—the study analyzes personal network changes over time, considering the interaction between life events and multiple foci of interaction across borders. The case studies presented illustrate the diversity of interactions and the multiple possible trajectories in migration while advocating for using mixed methods to address the phenomenon's complexity effectively.

The effects of biographical transitions on personal networks are most often studied for a single transition with a single survey. However, a comparative study of the effects of different transitions affecting different domains and stages of life (starting work, finding a partner, having a child, moving away, migrating, having a health problem, retiring...) can help to better identify the processes that are set in motion at the time of these transitions. These effects concern Ego's sociability, the number of alters cited, their roles, their characteristics, their similarity to Ego, the qualities of the relationships, as well as the overall structure of the network. These processes of network evolution - for example, the reduction or increase in its size, changes in its composition, the intensification of relationships, or the densification or centralization of its structure - are implemented by more precise mechanisms that constitute these processes at different levels. The aim here is to identify and compare these processes and mechanisms triggered by different transitions.

A team of 11 researchers from 6 countries has joined forces to produce a forthcoming book based on 13 surveys that allow both statistical and narrative analyses, with either a longitudinal or cross-sectional dimension. The idea is to build on the complementary nature of these surveys to identify recurrent processes and mechanisms typical of the 9 transitions studied. This presentation will describe the original approach of working together on a set of surveys subjected to mixed methods analysis, with common frameworks, concepts and objectives.

We investigate the significance of psychological traits for the evolution of social networks in a natural setting, specifically within bounded student groups. We focus on three crucial psychological traits: self-esteem, need for cognitive closure, and communion. Adopting a longitudinal approach, we use the Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model (SAOM) framework to explore the causal relationships between these psychological traits and friendship networks. In our study, a friendship tie is defined as the coexistence of liking and interaction.

We test the following hypotheses: Self-esteem increases popularity and activity in friendship network; There is expected homophily based on the level of self-esteem; Need for cognitive closure increases the role of triadic closure for creating friendship ties; There is expected homophily based on level of need for cognitive closure; Communion increases popularity and activity in friendship network; There is expected homophily based on level of communion; Communion increases the role of triadic closure for creating friendship ties.

Data were collected from 11 student groups across 4 universities located in 4 Polish cities. Each group consists of all 1st-year students from one major. The selection criterion was that the majors should be small enough for most classes to be taken as a single group. There were three waves of measurement: November/December 2022, March/April 2023, and July/August 2023.We analyze a dataset consisting of 6 bounded groups (the remaining groups were excluded due to low survey participation rates), covering 173 students who gave consent to participate in the study.

Background. Research on family relationships has primarily focused on solidarity exchanges between individuals, such as closeness, contact, and support, typically among relatives whom individuals know of. However, little attention has been given to ‘hidden’ kin - relatives whose existence is known to individuals’ but whose names or living status remain unknown, and with whom no solidarity is exchanged.

Objective. This study aims to a) identify the prevalence of ‘hidden’ kin across kin type (i.e., parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings), and b) examine the socio-demographic factors predicting ‘hidden’ kin.

Method. We use data from the U.S. sample of the KINMATRIX survey, which includes N=4,933 anchors who reported on N=96,160 biological anchor-kin dyads. ‘Hidden’ kin were identified based on a) the unknown living status of kin and b) the unknown name of kin. We used descriptive methods to assess the prevalence of ‘hidden’ kin across kin and logistic regression to identify predictors of ‘hidden’ kin.

Results. Descriptive results show unknown living status in 0.3% of anchor-sister/mother dyads, rising to 7.6% for anchor-paternal grandfather dyads. Unknown names occur in 18.24% of anchor-paternal grandfather dyads but none in anchor-sibling dyads. Logistic regression showed that younger, male, less educated, and anchors with disrupted family biographies were more likely to report unknown living status of kin. This was also more likely for Black but less likely for Asian/Asian American anchors compared to White anchors. Unknown kin names followed similar patterns but were also more common among Asian/Asian American anchors and less common among hetero anchors.

Many young adults face conflicting demands and expectations regarding their identities as members of social categories whose status in society is debated and contested, while expressing anxiety about the ties that link them with other persons. This paper presents the IdNet research project, which offers an analysis of personal networks and social identities of young adults during the eventful 2020-2023 period in Switzerland. The basis and driving force of this research is the edition of the Swiss Federal Surveys of Adolescents (www.chx.ch) dedicated to personal networks of young adults. It includes near full coverage of young Swiss men (N approx. = 60’000), as well as a sample of about 15’000 Swiss women, most between 18 and 21-year-old. Based on data from this large-scale representative national youth survey, and combined with a longitudinal follow-up study and an Internet extension to be conducted, the project investigates the psychosocial processes that transform personal networks into social identities. It further identifies the contextual conditions under which personal networks give rise to psychologically meaningful identities. The presentation stresses some of the opportunities but also challenges that such an interdisciplinary project presents.

The present paper aims to examine the perceived old-age support network among middle-aged never-married adults in Hong Kong. Family has been conceived as an important source of old-age support in both Western and Chinese societies. The increasing proportion of people remaining single throughout their lives and longevity of human life has prompted closer research attention to the social connections and old-age support of never-married individuals who do not have a family of their own. Moreover, the trend of population aging in many societies has generated great concerns for sustainable elderly care and support to be provided by the government, and subsequently, given rise to the concept of “aging in place”, which encourages older adults to utilize family and community resources, and middle-aged adults to plan early for old age. However, relatively scant research has examined middle-aged never-married adults’ perceived availability of old-age support, the relative importance of kin and non-kin ties as sources of old-age support, and the association with network relations.

To address the above issues, the present paper will employ data from a territory-wide random sample survey of 802 never-married adults aged between 40-59, which was conducted from mid-August to the end of December 2024. About 43% of the respondents have a partner and 20% live with their partner at the time of the survey. About 90% of the respondents have siblings. Respondents are asked to report on the expected sources of support in 11 areas of need when they enter old age, including day-to-day personal care, home repair, financial support, and companionship, etc. Support sources include self, partner, sibling, friend, relative, paid help, government, etc. They are also asked to indicate the extent to which they are concerned about whether these needs can be met.

About 30-60% of respondents report to rely on themselves for the 11 specified needs, particularly for financial and daily routine matters. More than 10% of the respondents do not expect to get help from anyone for all the 11 needs. Less than 10% of the respondents name siblings and friends as sources of support in old age, except that one-fourth of the respondents consider friends a source of companionship. The number of confidant ties and closeness with siblings are not associated with perceiving friends and siblings as sources of support. Relatives play a minimal role in perceived old-age support. Social capital, as measured by the number of occupations reached via social ties, is found to be associated with the tendency of self-reliance. Paid help and government support are perceived to be important sources of support in some areas, such as household chores, medical expenses, and housing. The findings will be discussed in the context of the self-reliance ideology and welfare regime in Hong Kong. Implications for social policies will also be explored.