UC Irvine

While the importance of geographic space in structuring social interactions is well established, much has remained unknown to researchers due in large part to the lack of available data on personal networks across space. Utilizing data from the American Social Fabric Study (Butts et al., 2014), a spatially stratified egocentric network study, this thesis aims to answer various methodological and substantive questions relating to networks and geography that have not been studied previously. The first paper is a methodological piece exploring what factors are related to the precision of geographic location of survey respondents (egos) as well as their social ties on six relations (alters). The second study examines an oft-studied social relation, that of the job seeking social tie, from a new perspective. In particular, we focus on the pool of potential job lead ties (rather than those that were mobilized) and study the relation in terms of multiplexity (i.e., the overlap of social relations) and locality to ego. The final paper examines another vital social relation: the ties that ego would seek to notify in the event of a disaster or emergency affecting his or her area. Given that this type of phenomenon is inherently spatial, we seek to understand the extent to which these ties are both spatially and socially embedded.