Strength of Weak ties in Social Networks

By P Vamsi Krishna MT2019131

Introduction:
In 1969 American Sociologist, Mark Granovetter submitted a research paper to American
Sociological Review. It was then rejected. Later this work was published in American Journal
of Sociology in 1973 and It became most cited work in Social Sciences (with over 50,000
citations as per Google scholar as of 2018).

In Social network analysis interpersonal ties are defined as information carrying connections
between people. These informational ties are of three types:
 Strong ties
 Weak ties
 Absent ties

Absent ties indicates no direct connectivity between two nodes in the network.
Before talking about ties, let’s talk about some terminology.
Triads:
A triad is a set of three nodes with two edges.
Let’s assume there are three nodes a, b, c. a and b are friends and a and c are also friends, i.e.
(a,b) and (a,c) are edges. Then as time passes by new edge (b,c) will be formed I.e. b will get
to know c or c will get to know b because of a. Thus, forming a triad.

Clustering Coefficient:
Consider the below two graphs. Nodes represents people and edges represent there
exists friendship between them.

Fig:1 Fig:2

The graph on the left says that Every node in knows every other node in the network.
Whereas the righthand side graph is a star graph indicating that the center node ‘f’ knows
every other node, but remaining nodes know nobody other than the center node ‘f’. So now
clustering coefficient of the node ‘f’ in
Now the clustering coefficient of the node ‘f’ is defined as
𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑓
Clustering coefficient cf(f) = 𝑀𝑎𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑢𝑚 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑓

For the graph in fig 1 the clustering coefficient (f) = 20/20 = 1

Whereas, for the graph in Fig:2 clustering coefficient = 0/20 = 0

So, the Clustering coefficient will vary between 0 and 1.

It is found that in most of the suicide cases the clustering coefficient of the victim is close to
or equal to 0. This doesn’t mean that those who attempted suicide do not have any friends.
They can have many friends but are not connected and are separate.

Neighborhood overlap:
Neighborhood overlap of two friends is defined as the ratio of number of common
friends to those two friends to the total number of friends of those two friends combined.

In the above graph the Neighborhood overlap of (A, B) is 5/13

𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠(𝐴) ∩ 𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠(𝐵)
Neighborhood overlap of(A,B) = .
𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠(𝐴) ∪𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠(𝐵)

Weak ties:
Weak tie is an edge upon whose removal the graph gets disconnected.
In the below graph edge between A and B is a weak tie. In general, finding such kind of
edges is very rare in social networks. So local bridges can also be considered as a weak tie.
 Fig:3

Local Bridge:
Weak bridge is said to exist if there exists an edge between two nodes, say A, B. and
A knows none of B’s friends and B knowns none of A’s friends. That is there doesn’t exist
triadic closure between A and B. In the below graph edge between A and B is a weak bridge.

Fig:4

In the above graph we can see that there is no edge between A and friends of B. and
also there is no edge between B and friends of A. Thus, in this kind of social network, if A
got a new connection then it is most probably from B. And so is the case for B. If new
connection is made to B, then it is most probably with A’s help. That is, strength of weak ties
is more when compared to the strength of strong ties in bringing more connections in social
networks.

Granovetter argues that these local bridges provide multiple opportunities to A form
completely unknow nodes through B and so is for B through A. This principle is in
suggesting friends in many social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc.