Gender and Structural Balance
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272431603262666
This article tracks friendships of 7th grade students over a year, collecting data on reciprocation of the friendship, the methods friends use to cope with problems, and how many remain friends at the end of the year. Although this article discusses pairs of friends instead of triads, groups, and entire networks, the results can still be interpreted using topics from this class. Additionally, this article brings attention to factors that can affect friendship, particularly gender.
When these researchers considered negative friendship characteristics, such as greater conflict and use of coping strategies such as minimization, passive coping, and being negative to others, it seemed normal to predict that these negative characteristics would create a less stable relationship. However, they found that for boys, minimization (acting like you do not care about an issue) was actually positively associated with friendship stability, with a slope of 0.27. Considering the structural balance theorem, which requires one or three positive links in a triad, this makes some sense. If you ignore an issue, you will not actually turn that edge negative. A hypothetical third friend likely would not be affected enough by minimization to take someone’s side and create instability.
For girls, minimization was negatively correlated with friendship stability, with a slope of -0.47. The article attributes this to the differences in how girls and boys treat friendship. It states that females consider their friendships to be more important than males, and males spend less time talking about personal issues. They prefer to be in groups rather than talk one-on-one, so they will use coping strategies that preserve stable group interaction by following the structural balance theorem. Additionally, males tend to have more conflict, so each conflict may be perceived as less important and be easier to minimize. Females prefer one on one interaction, and are more likely to violate the structural balance theorem since they don’t care as much about entire groups.
Although minimization was negatively correlated with friendship stability in girls, overall negative friendship characteristics were positively correlated with friendship stability, with a slope of 0.55. This suggests there are positive aspects of negative friendship correlations, and human interactions are actually governed by many social rules. One such rule is that it might be seen as “uncool” or “phony” if you tried to get along with people you did not like, instead of standing your ground.
The structural balance theorem can be viewed in conjunction with topics such as adolescence and gender studies. It would be interesting to expand on this article and understand social networks in other groups of people. Since this sample size was very homogenous, predominantly Caucasian and middle-class students, additional data may yield results that give more insight into the different ways the structural balance theorem presents itself.