Inproceedings,

Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook

, and .
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work &\#38; Social Computing, page 831--841. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (Oct 24, 2014)
DOI: 10.1145/2531602.2531642

Abstract

A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.

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