Month: February 2017

The data I collected showed that my network is mostly a homophily which I believe is due to my upbringing. I figure skated as a kid, but I loved hockey as well, yet I believe because of the way my parents were raised, both with quite traditional views (and mothers who fit stereotypical molds) they didn’t consider putting me in hockey because I am a girl and both of my brothers were put in to hockey. However as much as this is a personal trouble, it is just as much a public issue, because hockey was deemed “too rough” for girls and therefore steered parents away from signing them up. Segregating us girls and boys at a young age like my parents were, which is what C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination said about how history affects our biographies. That can contribute to the fact that other than my 3 family members I only have 2 male friends who I am close with, which stems from the ideology of our childhood that girls and boys are different. However, I did enjoy figure skating because that’s where I made the majority of my close friends, and the rest I made in the French immersion program at school. But this too was predetermined for me, as both my parents got post-secondary education and wanted to put their kids in a more challenging and engaging program to encourage us to pursuit post-secondary studies as well, plus they could afford to live close to this school as well as send me to skating lessons. The reason why I made friends who are so similar to me is because we lived in a middle class area close to good schools and ice rinks. Along with the idea that my parents pushed us to pursue university, growing up with kids in the same situation led to a competitive environment that pushed me and my friend group to strive for the best.  I personally aspired to push beyond what my parents had achieved, as my dad went to college and my mom went to UVIC. Now UVIC is not an unimpressive school, but UBC is just a higher personal achievement, and I would be the first one of my family to attain such an achievement. The idea of where my parents went to school, and how their parents did not attained school and where my brothers and cousins may end up made me aspire to achieve higher personal goals. And my friend group desired similar things because we all came from similar upbringings with financial stability that allowed us to focus on experiences and learning. During my time here at UBC I have found that because my friends had similar aspirations and that many are here with me, our relationships have only grown stronger and I haven’t needed to make new friends here at UBC. Compared to my discussion group, those who grew up in Vancouver have found the same thing, since they are local and have friends who are quite similar to them they haven’t made very many new friends from university. Whereas the people in my discussion group who aren’t from Vancouver have found that most of their friends are from UBC due to the fact that they didn’t come here with many contacts or come from very different backgrounds from myself. Therefore, my network is compiled of people who resemble to me, partly due to my parents raising me how they did, yet compared to others with a related background it’s a similar story.

Geography and proximity play significant roles in the networks we have. Discussing with my peers, I discovered that many of them grew up in the city of Vancouver or nearby. This meant that their personal networks included interactions established well before the university context, with people such as work colleagues, high school friends, and sports teammates.

Myself, having moved from Calgary to Vancouver for university meant that I had to create a network from scratch. After arriving in the city, I began investing in a strong community on campus and formed a tightly knitted core group of friends. My high network cohesion became apparent when doing the mapping exercise, where I noticed that my personal network appeared very dense. Most of the individuals in my network had close ties with one another, with weak ties existing between the majority of them. This made sense when looking back at attributes that I used to for categorization. The individuals in my network operate within a very specific geography of the university context.

While the network map provided a visual insight, the E-I index was a qualitative method that I used to calculate homophily. All of the attributes I used to measure this index showed high homophily (i.e. education, occupation, age, religion) except for one, race. I identify myself as Taiwanese-Canadian. My roommates come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. I share a roof with a Swiss-born German, an American with mixed European roots and a Zambian-born, Tswana (person from Botswana) born to Indian parents. In the multicultural context of Canada and to a more local extent, the city of Vancouver, this example of hyper-globalisation has become the norm.

World Society Theory is a theory of globalisation that states that there is increasing homogenization of individuals due to an idea of world culture (Meyer 144). Reinvestigating the attributes where homophily existed in my personal network, I see values embedded within this “world culture” framework. A framework of social constructs indicating that if one is in their late-teens (age), and falls into a certain income bracket (class), that the formal institution of university (education) is the appropriate option. These global set of values and beliefs have defined my history and will continue define my future. Geographical distance no longer acts a barrier, but rather as evidence for this increasingly integrate, interrelated network.

The scales of global to local can be understood through the concept of sociological imagination proposed by C. W. Mills (1959). My roommates often share personal narratives about the societal problems faced by their respective countries by presenting them at a relatable, micro scale of the individual, and then extrapolating them to macro, societal issues. As insightful as these experiences are, every individual has a bias in their perceptions and the enlightening inferences one makes about society as a larger whole can be equally ignorant to the parts unseen.

So while the multiethnic house I live in is an example of how a global society and its “world culture” has affected individuals such as my roommates and myself, the homophilies present in this network provide a narrow scope of society. It is a biased concentration of commonalities in a hyperlocal space despite our personal hyperglobal geographies.

 

Literature Cited:

Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco O. Ramirez. 1997. “World Society and the Nation-State.” American Journal of Sociology 103:144-181

Mills, C. Wright. 1959/2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York. Oxford University Press.