4 Tie Strength – Social Networks

4.1 The Content of Social Relations

In everyday life, we tend to distinguish different types of social relations by their content (Burt 1997). For instance, you distinguish between the relationships you have with your parents from those you have with your friends. Within your friendship group, you distinguish between different types of friends. For instance, you may say “that’s my work friend or”that’s my best friend. There are some relationships that are one of a kind (or exclusive, in the sense that it wouldn’t be appropriate to have multiple of them at the same time) like the one you have with your significant other.

Sometimes, there are rules against mixing relationship contents. Although it has become more common of late, in some cultures it is still weird for your parent to also be your best friend. Or for your boss to also be your confidant. Some relationships that mix contents may even acquire a new content designation as when you have a friend who is also a sexual partner, but not necessarily your significant other.

Of course, these relationship content examples draw from common knowledge in the Euro-American west, but anthropologists, historians, and area scholars have cataloged myriad of relationship contents that have been developed across different historical eras, nations, and geographical regions. Most of them, like the patronage relation in early modern Europe documented by McLean (1998) (and the related patron or padrino relation in some parts of Latin America and Southern Italy), have no real counterpart in the United States today.

Sorting relations by the activities you do with others is another way of distinguishing social ties based on content in the contemporary era (Feld 1981). Thus, you can have your workout buddies, or your pick up basketball crew or your clubbing posse. You can also have friends that you only see at chess club or your favorite reading group, or people you only know via online gaming.

4.2 The Form of Social Relations

Network analysis in the social sciences is distinctive because it breaks with commonsense practice in differentiating social relations not based on their content, but rather based on their form (Burt 1982, 22). For instance, one aspect of the form of social relationships is the tie strength or the intensity of the relationship between two people.

As we will see, tie strength has many components, but the point is that the formal characteristics of relations cut across different types of contents. Thus, we can have friends that we don’t really feel than intensely about, which is different from our close friends that we do feel intensely about.

Closeness, as a formal feature of social ties, can also show up in kin relations (my close relative) or even specialized relations (my closest friend at work). Other aspects of intensity, like frequency of interaction cuts across relationship types. Thus, you can have people who you don’t consider “friends” in terms of content, but with who you have a very intense relation in terms of form, like co-workers that you interact with and see everyday, more than you may see your family members!

Another formal aspect of social relations, based on activities, is the number of shared activities you have with others. This is a version of intensity, since clearly someone you share multiple activities with (a person who is your golf buddy, and your drinking buddy, and your workout buddy) is more important than a person you share no or only a single activity with. This formal aspect of social ties was discussed in Chapter 31.

4.3 Defining Tie Strength

Tie strength is arguably the most important formal property of social ties. At least, it is the one that has been most argued about, theorized, and researched in sociological network analysis (Marsden and Campbell 1984). To give you a sense of how important tie strength is, the sociologist Mark Granovetter wrote and article in 1973 entitled “The Strength of Weak Ties,” which has become one of the most highly referenced articles in the history of social science (Granovetter 1973).

Clearly tie strength is a big deal. But what is it exactly?

Well begin with the intuition that, if you were to scan the various ties in your ego network, not all would be of the same intensity. You will feel very close to some people, want to hang out with them often, and be willing to support them (financially, emotionally, helping them move). Other people in your social network, you may like just fine, but you just don’t feel that close to them and are not willing to given them the shirt off your back. So intuitively, the first kinds of ties are strong ties and the second kind of ties are weak ties. Everyone’s local social network is a mixture of strong and weak ties (and everything in between).

So clearly, while we can get an intuitive idea of what a strong and a weak tie is, we need to get more specific. It is clear that from the above description that tie strength is not a single property of ties. Instead, it is a cluster of such properties that somehow hang together. So it is important to enumerate the core components of tie strength, because theoretically they can be measured separately. Besides, it is also important to keep those properties that are unique to tie strength distinct from other tie properties.

There has been a tendency in the literature to confuse the concept of tie strength for what are in fact other tie properties that just happen to be typically correlated with it like similarities and the varieties of structural embeddedness discussed later). So there is difference between saying “typically when people share a lot of similarities their tie is likely to be strong” and saying “similar ties are strong ties.”

So what are the sub-properties that together make up a strong tie? To begin we can consult the definition of tie strength Granovetter provided in his classic paper. According to Granovetter, tie strength is “…a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding) and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie” (Granovetter 1973, 1361).

So here Granovetter mentions the four core components that would later on be canonized by the sociologists Peter Marsden and Karen Campbell as the core indicators of tie strength (Marsden and Campbell 1984).

4.3.1 Duration and Frequency

To begin, strong ties are the ones that take up most of your time and that have lasted the longest. That is frequency of interaction and tie duration are two core sub-properties that strong ties have. Think of your the friends that you hang out with often and that you’ve known for a long time; those ties are strong.

4.3.2 Support and Reciprocal Services

The other things Granovetter mentions are number of behaviors that people who have strong ties do with respect to each other. First, you can confide in your strong ties (tell them secrets or sensitive info about you); second people who share a strong tie do things for one another (“reciprocal services”). In the social networks literature these set of behaviors are known as social support. So you can provide support to your strong ties by listening to guarding their secrets and listening to their problems, or helping them study, or lending them twenty bucks. So the ties that feature a heavy (two way!) reciprocal flow of services and mutual confiding are strong.

4.3.3 Subjective Closeness

Last, and very much not least, you wouldn’t be hanging out with people or keeping a tie alive for a long time, or helping them with their trials and tribulations unless you didn’t have an emotional attachment to those people! So strong ties are those that feature (once again mutual) feelings of subjective closeness and that’s exactly how you would describe them to a sociologist if they came asking. Strong ties are those people in your network you feel closest to.

So there you have it. Strong ties are those connections you have that have lasted the longest, you interact with most frequently, feature mutual support and confiding, and you feel closest to. If a tie has all these components then it is strong for sure. If it lacks all these components, there is no question that it is weak.

4.4 The Tie Strength Continuum

However, the question of whether a tie is strong or weak is not a “yes/no,” or “black/white” thing. The reason for this is that while all four indicators or tie strength are correlated they are not deterministically linked to one another. Some ties can be high on some indicators and low in others. This is why rather than a binary there is a tie strength continuum. Some ties are just in-between because they contain a mixture of strong and weak components.

For instance, there people at work you see every day but are not that subjectively close to. By the same token, there may be a friend from high school that lives in a faraway place you don’t hang out with or communicate very often, but you feel very close to. These ties are “in between” strong and weak.

Ties between parents and children also have features of both strong and weak ties. For instance, parents tend to provide their children with a lot of support (usually of the emotional and financial kind), but parents seldom (lest we get a case of the TMIs!) share their deepest sexual secrets or marital difficulties with their children (or vice versa).

Kin ties in general (including that between siblings) tend to combine features of strong and weak ties.¹ You usually feel subjective close to your brother or sister, but that doesn’t mean you hang out with them all the time.

Another example of a “mixed” strong/weak tie is the “love at first sight” phenomenon. Here we have a tie with very little duration (they just met!) but featuring a strong emotional feeling of closeness. Maybe the reason people find love at first sight strange or counter-intuitive is because it combines strong and weak tie properties.

Examples could be expanded indefinitely, but the take-away point is that most ties in social networks are not super strong or super weak, but are somewhere in between, featuring components of both strong and weak ties.

In sum, we can summarize the key differences between strong and weak ties as follows:

Feature	Strong Ties	Weak Ties
Duration	Long-lasting relationships	Short-lived or more recent relationships
Frequency	Frequent interaction	Infrequent interaction
Closeness	High emotional intensity, mutual intimacy	Low emotional intensity, more distant
Support	Reciprocal services and mutual confiding	Lack of reciprocal services and confiding

References

Burt, Ronald S. 1982. Toward a Structural Theory of Action. Vol. 10. Academic Press.

Burt, Ronald S. 1997. “A Note on Social Capital and Network Content.” Social Networks 19 (4): 355–73.

Feld, Scott L. 1981. “The Focused Organization of Social Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 86 (5): 1015–35.

Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–80.

Marsden, Peter V, and Karen E Campbell. 1984. “Measuring Tie Strength.” Social Forces 63 (2): 482–501.

McLean, Paul D. 1998. “A Frame Analysis of Favor Seeking in the Renaissance: Agency, Networks, and Political Culture.” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1): AJSv104p51–91.