A Relational Measure of Social Status from Adolescent Friendship Networks

• In Event: 373 - Regular Session. Group Processes 3

Abstract

Network measures of social status are traditionally determined by comparing individuals in a population to the network structure of that population as a whole. In contrast, this paper develops a measure of social status as an unobserved ranking of pairwise status differences between the members of a network. Status is thus conceived of as a relational quality, characterized by differences in perceived prestige rather than absolute quantities. This dyadic model of status allows the rigorous statistical approach to its estimation — status structures can be compared according to their likelihood given an observed network. Furthermore, the relational character of the measure yields nuanced structural details beyond a simple status ordering, easily producing rich partial status orderings and directed acyclic status graphs. Using friendship nomination data from Add Health, this paper estimates status rankings among the students in twenty school-level social networks. The findings show that students are most likely to nominate friends of a similar social prestige to their own, but that they are significantly more likely to nominate those of somewhat higher prestige than those of somewhat lower prestige. This study further suggests that prestige is closely related to students’ age while it has a weaker connection to sex and race. Finally, paper explores structures of parallel and intersecting hierarchies, showing that the topology of status relations changes significantly for students as they age. The results suggest that the social prestige rankings presented here describe an important component of stratification that is largely neglected in existing work.

Author

• Peter McMahan, University of Chicago