January 29, 2005
Who's zooming who
This is really, really cool: James Moody, a sociologist at Ohio State University, mapped all the romantic and sexual connections that had taken place an 18-month period at a 1,000-person high school, in a rural mostly-white area. Remarkably, he got 832 of the students to talk to him. He mapped out the connections, in that graph above. See that one huge clump? That's the most interesting part, as a university press release notes:
The most striking feature of the network was a single component that connected 52 percent (288) of the romantically involved students at Jefferson. This means student A had relations with student B, who had relations with student C and so on, connecting all 288 of these students.
While this component is large, it has numerous short branches and is very broad – the two most distant individuals are 37 steps apart. (Or to use a currently popular term, there were 37 degrees of separation between the two most-distant students.)
“From a student’s perspective, a large chain like this would boggle the mind,” Moody said. “They might know that their partner had a previous partner. But they don’t think about the fact that this partner had a previous partner, who had a partner, and so on.
“What this shows, for the first time, is that there are many of these links in a chain, going far beyond what anyone could see and hold in their head.”
There seems to be a quantum leap in the size of one's zooming network. Either you belonged to that enormous, borg-like structure -- about half the students -- or you belonged to a very small, sealed-off network of three or fewer students. There was almost no-one in the middle: Almost no-one in a network of 4 to 15 students. In a way, it freakily reinforces the age-old virgin-whore typology of teen sexuality. Kids who wanted to be exclusive and monogamous dated likeminded kids, producing the sealed-off small networks; kids who dated more freely would hook up with those who also dated that way, producing the massive, interlocking chain.
This might be useful data in understanding how sexually-transmitted diseases spread in high schools. I'd be even more fascinated to see what the patterns would look like in one of those schools where students take the "chastity pledge" not to have sex before marriage. A while ago, I read the study that two professors did of the pledge's effect (a PDF of it is here) and it was quite interesting: Taking the pledge greatly delayed whether a teenager actually had sex, to the extent that a non-pledging teenager was as likely to have sex with his/her first dating partner as a pledge-taking teenager who was on his/her fourth dating partner. The problem, the scientists discovered, is that the pledge only worked if the pledge-takers comprised a minority of the highschool population. That's because the pledge was regarded as a badge of nonconformist pride. Ironically, if too many people in the school actually take the pledge, it doesn't work any more. Worse, when pledge-takers eventually did have sex, they were far less likely than non-pledge-takers to use birth control and to guard against STDs. (Notably, when the government officials released these results and proudly announced that pledges were an "effective tool", they downplayed this latter finding and completely failed to report the fact that the pledge works less the more people take it.) Anyway, I'd love to see what one of Moody's charts looks like for a "pledging" school!
The other question, of course, is whether the kids were actually telling Moody the truth. There would be all sorts of reasons for teens to lie -- either overreporting (to seem sexually adventurous), or underreporting (to keep from looking like they were too loose).
(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at January 29, 2005 01:22 AM
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Just curious, does it say anywhere what's the background for some of the represented chains of relationships being portrayed as straight lines, whereas others look more curved like?
Wow, amazing post. I spent a few minutes squinting at the graph, and something interesting popped out at me. I started looking at "pimp" behavior - which I defined (arbitrarily) as a node connected to at least 5 other nodes (regardless of gender). What I noticed is there are a total of 6 pimps on the graph, 5 of which are female and 1 male. 3 of these females are at the center of their own, completely detached, cluster of males. The single male is the king pimp on the graph, with a total of nine female connections.
I don't know what that means to a sociologist, but it's interesting nonetheless. I think it might be easier to swallow, however, if this data were for a small college, since there's so much angst over teens and sex. I hope Mr. Moody doesn't get too much heat for that.
What I don't understand is why there aren't two unconnected dots, one representing unconnected females and one unconnected males. Has everyone dated someone?
I disagree with your finding of the virgin/whore dichotomy. As peter noted, the flagrantly promiscuous individuals are evenly distributed between the large and small networks. The little tendrils trailing off the central ring are generally isometric to the smaller graphs pictured, on the ommision of any given link to the ring. Essentially, the only difference between the tendrils and the smaller networks is then the former's inclusion of some interloper, and these give rise to the huge blob. Members of the blob, then, aren't so because of association with similarly profligate individuals, but because of their association with some abstract social network representing the core of it. I'm guessing that it's not the debate club.
My favorite is the 5-connection node to the left of the big network, reinforcing my conclusion that adolescent girls who experiment with bisexuality are are merely bored with traditional outlets of excessive promiscuity.
(Even) less scientific, but no less entertaining, is the study referred to at the end of this post : http://www.aflickeringlight.com/2004/11/i_arrived_home_.html.
Ignore my blathering and head straight for the last couple of paragraphs. Amongst some of the unreliable conclusions are an apparent link between oral sex and high grades....
Killingen and Peter, good questions -- I don't know the answer to them.
Drew, let me think about your point; I think you might be right, that I'm reading that chart wrong.
Waterhot, checking that out now ... ahahahahh ....
You might find some of Ron Burt's stuff interesting, if you aren't familiar with it (which you probably are).
My favorite of his work is "Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital":
Here's a link to some pre-pub chapters:
http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/ronald.burt/research/
Would love to hear your thoughts on his work. I'm trying to work it into my dissertation on Virtual Collaboration and Collaborative Networks.
--Lori
Definitely an interesting graph. I thought it a bit unfortunate they they chose to collapse the smaller networks (1-1, 1-2, 2-1) and just display a number with them. While that does conserve space, I think it would have provided a far more interesting visual overview had each of those smaller groupings been shown.
Also, allmost nobody (I can only find two examples) are doing it with people from their own sex. Is it because they're not yet out of the closet at that age?
Dear Clive:
That diagram, and your statement, "This might be useful data in understanding how sexually-transmitted diseases spread in high schools," reminded me of the 1999 PBS/Frontline documentary, *The Lost Children of Rockdale County.*
That film explored "how a 1996 syphilis outbreak in a well-off Atlanta suburb affected over 200 teenagers."
You can read about it here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/georgia/
As well, the doc features an image, created by the local health department, to show the spread of the disease in this instance, picturing it as a network of transmission lines and nodes; see:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/georgia/outbreak/matrix.html
Produce Justice,
Harry Allen
I find the lack of same-sex reporting interesting. I wonder if the students involved in same-sex play don't consider their activity fitting into Moody's categories: essentially (i) dating w/ intercourse, (ii) intercourse w/o dating.
(And to echo Harry's comment, that Frontline documentary is great.)
Actually, Drew, if you look at around 8 o'clock on the big blob, you'll notice that the only reported male same-sex connection is two males who each also had three female partners. So I don't know if you can draw any conclusions about same-sex exploration being an adjunct to promiscuity in adolescent girls. Particularly since the study parameters (in that a connection represents either a romantic relationship or intercourse) are likely to result in the underreporting of same-sex relationships in general and female-female relationships in particular.
Killingen, I think the curved lines are only a result of having to connect individuals.
Peter, if you look at the article, it says they interviewed 832 of about 1000 students, 573 of which (about 70%) were in romantic or sexual relationships and are therefore mapped. So, yes, there should be 259 single dots.
debcha
(who is supposed to be working on a grant application, and is instead procrastinating massively)
"This one time... at band camp."
At the end of a summer as a camp counselor two enterprising fellow counselor put their heads together after the campers left and came up with a map of every counselor "hook-up" that had occurred. There were different colored lines for various stages of interaction (make-out, sex, relationship) and even lines indicating an unrealized desire on one person's part to get it on with someone else.
It was an amazing thing to see, though it did piss a fair number of people off.
As I recall we had a bunch of individual strings, and then two largish clumps that were slightly interconnected. One thing that was pretty clear from the map was that the 'clumps' were formed through the actions of a handful of people. Most everyone had only one or two connections (or none, he said with a mournful tone of regret) but it was these few people that tied everyone else together.
Ya know, in all the summer camps and schools I attended with less than five thousand students, there was this central "popular group" then there were all the other groups of people. The big ring could very well be the sexual interaction of the popular group. This is not to say that the popular group had no divisions, only that there was more interaction between divisions in the popular group than there was between the other divisions in the school/camp/whatever.
Unless numerous studies were done that showed more or less the same type of clumping, I wouldn't draw too many conclusions. Think how extraordinarily different the map would look if one of the smaller clumps connected two dots on opposite sides of the larger clump’s circle, and think about how easily that might happen.
In my high school there was a website that tracked relationships, with each person as a page with links to other people in chronological order. It was taken down after one person denied being in a gay relationship and bitched out the website creator on her answering machine. Bitched out rather flamingly, in fact, but I digress.
Arg .... I posted a whole big response to the comments here, but it appears to have been deleted when I ran MT-Blacklist to clean out recent instances of comment spam. How ironic is that?
Great stuff here all around, though.
Lori, I'm going to go look at that paper now ... thanks for the link!
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