Premium
Who Cares About Your Big Day? Impact of Life Events on Dynamics of Social Networks
Author(s) -
Srinivasan Arati,
Guo Hong,
Devaraj Sarv
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
decision sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.238
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1540-5915
pISSN - 0011-7315
DOI - 10.1111/deci.12255
Subject(s) - embeddedness , social network (sociolinguistics) , friendship , event (particle physics) , interpersonal ties , perspective (graphical) , social network analysis , network dynamics , social media , sociology , internet privacy , computer science , psychology , world wide web , social psychology , social science , physics , mathematics , discrete mathematics , quantum mechanics , artificial intelligence
With online social networking having revolutionized the way in which individuals communicate and interact with each other, there is heightened research interest in the dynamics of social networks. This article seeks to contribute to this stream of research by addressing the key question of the impact of major life events, such as getting married or graduating from college, on social network evolution. Consistent with prior studies on the evolution of individuals’ social networks, we specifically focus on two key attributes of an individual's network: indegree of ties and relational embeddedness. By longitudinally analyzing the network activities of a large‐scale online social network, we find that the indegree of ties increased significantly following a major life event, and that this impact was stronger for more active users in the network. Interestingly, we also find that the broadcast of major life events served to revive dormant ties as reflected by a decrease in embeddedness following a life event. We also found that one‐time life events such as weddings had a greater impact than recurring life events such as birthdays on the evolution of a user's social network. From a research perspective, our study contributes to existing research by focusing on a user's communication network as opposed to friendship network and by emphasizing how exogenous life events add a different dimension to user communication patterns. The importance of life events on social network evolution has important implications for practice as well by providing insights to advertisers as well as to social networking sites.