Northeastern professor Cassie McMillan finds stronger ties connect youth sharing gender, ethnicity, religious background or socioeconomic status.
It’s not just a saying — new research from Northeastern University confirms that birds of a feather really do flock together.
“Stronger ties were more likely to connect adolescents who had characteristics in common,” says Cassie McMillan, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University.
“Friendships where young people spend a lot of time together outside of school, trust one another and have strong feelings of intimacy towards one another are more likely to connect youth of the same gender, ethnic background, religious background and socioeconomic status.”
Sociologists have long noticed that social networks are often segregated by sociodemographic characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, religion and class … just look at any middle or high school cafeteria, McMillan notes.
Such homophily — or people’s preferences to associate with others who are similar — has been documented in relationships that range from marriages and best friendships to acquaintanceships. But past research — including, McMillan notes, her own — has been inconclusive on whether stronger homophily is connected with stronger relationships.
So McMillan analyzed data from 600 schools with more than 20,000 adolescents ages 9 to 17 years old from Israel, England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.
The data included information on the youth’s gender, ethnicity (born in vs. born outside the home country), religious background and socioeconomic status.
The data also included information on students’ relationship ties.
Best friendships, romantic partners, spouses are characterized as strong ties — “people who you would go to in times of crisis and spend a lot of time with,” McMillan says.
Weak ties characterize relationships like acquaintances and people you generally like but don’t see very often, McMillan explains.
McMillan found, as recently published in the journal Social Forces, that youth with traits in common were more likely to have strong ties. The effect was also additive — the more characteristics in common, the stronger a pair’s friendship is expected to be. People connected by weak ties were less likely to share characteristics.
Interestingly, homophily holds for both positive and negative relationships.
“We see that kids tend to be friends with those who have similar characteristics to their own, and they frequently date people who have similar characteristics as themselves,” McMillan says. “People even bully and dislike peers who share their same socio-demographic characteristics.”
But McMillan is explicit that both relationships defined by strong ties and relationships defined by weak ties are important.
“Strong ties tend to help us go through the challenges we face in our daily lives,” McMillan says. She cites emotional support and intimacy as provided by strong ties.
“Weak ties can be great because they tend to span across different social clusters and communities,” McMillan continues. “Because they’re people you don’t talk to as much, they probably have access to different kinds of information, different ideas, different norms than your dense enclave of strong ties might know about. So it’s through weak ties that we can gain access to new information.”
McMillan says it’s complicated to explain why people may prefer to associate with others who are similar.
Research has shown that people feel more comfortable interacting with people who are similar due to assumptions of shared commonalities and experiences, McMillan says. Moreover, the “hyper segregated communities” in which we live also shape individuals’ opportunities to meet, and prejudice also plays a role, she adds.
In fact, McMillan says the next step in her research is looking closer at how diversity may shape the tendency toward racial and ethnic homophily.
“It could be the case that if you’re in a very diverse environment, there will be lower levels of prejudice, people might be more comfortable interacting with folks who are different than themselves,” McMillan says. “On the other hand, in more racially diverse environments, people who identify as members of minority ethnic groups may have more opportunities to form friendships with people who are similar to them.”