HNDS-R: Network Formation and Function Within and Between Cultural Groups

This project studies the development of social relationships between culturally distinct groups and how people use those relationships. As populations around the world face growing pressure from climate change, the risk of environmental catastrophe, depletion of local resources, and conflict between groups increases. Yet, social relationships can supply resources for day-to-day survival, such as food, money, and physical assistance. Social relationships that cross groups may be especially important in times of stress because they provide access to crucial resources that cannot be obtained locally. The social relationships a person has are shaped by the groups a person belongs to, such as their household or neighborhood, and by their personal characteristics such as their age or gender, as well as the relationships they have with others. To better understand how between-group relationships develop and function, this project studies multilevel networks of friendship and social support in two adjacent but culturally distinct populations. The project collects data on how these networks develop and evolve over time. It also collects data on individual characteristics, such as age, gender, and status to understand how personal characteristics shape social relationships. Bringing together theory and data from anthropology, network science, and sociology, this project uses network models to identify the factors that encourage relationships between these two populations, including factors that promote resilience in the face of limited resources. The project uses state-of-the-art simulation-based methods to analyze data at the level of individuals and at the level of groups, combining several sources of data to learn about how network structure and individual and group characteristics are related to the mechanisms of relationship-building. In doing so, this work tells us how individuals build and leverage relationships that provide access to supportive resources within and beyond their communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.