Racial Homophily and its Effect on U.S. Social Networks
Homophily can be described as the tendency for people to be attracted to and stick with people that are similar to themselves. Racial homophily refines the meaning of homophily further by indicating that individuals of the same race form connections more often, resulting in racial homogeneity. This paper I linked below discusses how Triadic Closure strongly influences racial homophily within friendship networks since friends of friends will often befriend one another. This paper does conclude that triadic closure does amplify the effects of racial homophily. Two friends of the same race are likely to befriend one another due to similar shared experiences, upbringing, interests, etc. For example, black people tend to connect more because they face the same struggle of trying to navigate a society that was built on racism and discrimination.
This paper chose to look at a freshman class at an American Private College to gauge whether racial homophily does affect the formation of social networks. In this study, the authors define the friendships among these students through ‘Facebook friends’ (which represents the standard friending feature on Facebook, ‘Picture friends’ (which represents photos that were posted with that friend), and ‘housing groups’ which represent students who live together. They define these as ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ ties with ‘strong’ representing an emotional closeness to that person. While this study did have limitations, the purpose was to discover whether racial homophily itself affects the formation of friendship networks, or if there were other factors such as ethnicity, shared interests, etc. The result from this study proved that their racial homophily is present in relationships among students. Racial homophily is particularly high among Black students (as shown in the diagram).
Even in my own experience, I have noticed that students and people, in general, tend to gravitate towards people that look like them. For example, I went to a high school that was predominantly black, yet there students were from other races as well. I noticed that the few white students that attended my school were close friends and the Asian students in my school would stick together. I think that this definitely constitutes as an example of racial homophily. Although racial homophily can explain a lot of the relationships that develop between people, it is still also important to consider other factors that can explain the relationships and connections that form.