IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v60y2009i2p219-231.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Homophily in MySpace

Author

Listed:
  • Mike Thelwall

Abstract

Social network sites like MySpace are increasingly important environments for expressing and maintaining interpersonal connections, but does online communication exacerbate or ameliorate the known tendency for offline friendships to form between similar people (homophily)? This article reports an exploratory study of the similarity between the reported attributes of pairs of active MySpace Friends based upon a systematic sample of 2,567 members joining on June 18, 2007 and Friends who commented on their profile. The results showed no evidence of gender homophily but significant evidence of homophily for ethnicity, religion, age, country, marital status, attitude towards children, sexual orientation, and reason for joining MySpace. There were also some imbalances: women and the young were disproportionately commenters, and commenters tended to have more Friends than commentees. Overall, it seems that although traditional sources of homophily are thriving in MySpace networks of active public connections, gender homophily has completely disappeared. Finally, the method used has wide potential for investigating and partially tracking homophily in society, providing early warning of socially divisive trends.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Thelwall, 2009. "Homophily in MySpace," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(2), pages 219-231, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:60:y:2009:i:2:p:219-231
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.20978
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20978
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.20978?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Judd Antin & Matthew Earp, 2010. "With a little help from my friends: Self‐interested and prosocial behavior on MySpace Music," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(5), pages 952-963, May.
    2. Kang, Ju-Young M. & Johnson, Kim K.P., 2015. "F-Commerce platform for apparel online social shopping: Testing a Mowen’s 3M model," International Journal of Information Management, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 691-701.
    3. Elina H. Hwang & Param Vir Singh & Linda Argote, 2015. "Knowledge Sharing in Online Communities: Learning to Cross Geographic and Hierarchical Boundaries," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 26(6), pages 1593-1611, December.
    4. Stefano Guarino & Enrico Mastrostefano & Massimo Bernaschi & Alessandro Celestini & Marco Cianfriglia & Davide Torre & Lena Rebecca Zastrow, 2021. "Inferring Urban Social Networks from Publicly Available Data," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 13(5), pages 1-45, April.
    5. Wang, Yukai & Yang, Zhongkai & Liu, Lanjian & Wang, Xianwen, 2020. "Gender bias in patenting process," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    6. Jalees, Tariq & Tariq, Huma & Zaman, Syed Imran & Alam Kazmi, Syed Hasnain, 2015. "Social Media in Virtual Marketing," MPRA Paper 69868, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 10 Apr 2015.
    7. Zhechao (Charles) Liu & Nima Kordzadeh & Yoris A. Au & Jan G. Clark, 2012. "Investigating the Reciprocal Relationships Within Health Virtual Communities," Working Papers 0007, College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio.
    8. Lu (Lucy) Yan & Jianping Peng & Yong Tan, 2015. "Network Dynamics: How Can We Find Patients Like Us?," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 26(3), pages 496-512, September.
    9. Klepsch, Markus, 2023. "Do birds of a feather always flock together? A multidimensional examination of homophily in crowdfunding," Junior Management Science (JUMS), Junior Management Science e. V., vol. 8(1), pages 237-269.
    10. Jens F. Binder & Alistair G. Sutcliffe, 2014. "The Best of Both Worlds? Online Ties and the Alternating Use of Social Network Sites in the Context of Migration," Societies, MDPI, vol. 4(4), pages 1-17, December.
    11. Marc Esteve-Del-Valle, 2022. "Homophily and Polarization in Twitter Political Networks: A Cross-Country Analysis," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(2), pages 81-92.
    12. Tianshu Sun & Sean J. Taylor, 2020. "Displaying things in common to encourage friendship formation: A large randomized field experiment," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 237-271, September.
    13. Anikó Tompos & Jawad Abu Khair, 2023. "The Impact of Social Media Relationships on e-WOM in Syria and Hungary," Review of Applied Socio-Economic Research, Pro Global Science Association, vol. 25(1), pages 52-65, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:60:y:2009:i:2:p:219-231. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.