A new study indicates that the number of confidants Americans have has decreased over the past 20 years. This finding marks one of several studies that indicate that Americans’ social networks are decreasing. The primary proponent of this theory is political scientist, Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone, describes the general decline in civic engagement. In this study sociologists Lynn Smith-Lovin, Miller McPherson, and Matthew Brashears were focused specifically on friends and confidants. Here is a quote from the abstract of their study:
The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third (one confidant), from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Most people have densely interconnected confidants similar to them.
The study also found that:
• The trend toward social isolation mirrors other class divides: Non-whites and people with less education tend to have smaller networks than white Americans and the highly educated.
• Racial diversity among people’s networks has increased. The percentage of people who count at least one person of another race in their close network has gone up from about 9 percent to more than 15 percent.
• The percentage of people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from about 57 percent to about 80 percent, while the number of people who depend totally on their spouse has increased from about 5 percent to about 9 percent.
Our families and communities are undergoing some dramatic changes, as people become more and more isolated. What do you think has lead to these changes? What do you think can be done to reverse these trends (assuming you think this is negative), or is this just a product of our contemporary postmodern lives? Do you think your own experience is reflected in these trends?
Here is the link to the summary of the study. and here is a link to the authors findings. (PDF)
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How can the mode drop from 3 to 0 while the mean drops from 3 to 2? That would seem to indicate a very weird data set, where suddenly lots of people have no friends while a few people have tons of friends, preventing the mean from dropping all the way to the basement.
It doesn’t reflect my own experience, which has been a steadily expanding circle of acquaintance- and friendship. Assuming the measured phenomenon is real, I’d give some credit/blame to the Internet – you can have a lot of “friends” without the real costs of having friends, and for many people that may be as much or more emotionally satisfying, at least over the short run.
As Techdirt points out, the whole survey may be mooted by poor questions:
I think it’s possible that the substitution of electronic communication for face-to-face is having a negative impact on connectedness, because it’s much much easier and faster to talk about the really deep stuff in person, so that relationships become more superficial. OTOH, electronic communication makes it easier to reach out to more people more often, so it’s harder to be isolated. I have a number of close friends with whom I speak on the phone or e-mail at least weekly, but I maybe see them in person twice a year. The in-person times are the ones when the really deep stuff comes up, although some issues may be hinted at in our phone conversations and e-mails. Just my 2 cents.
It’s not that weird of a distribution. It went from being a fairly sharply peaked distribution centered at 3 to being a long fat-tailed distribution with the largest value at 0, but dropping only slightly from 0 to 3, with some values above 3. Since there are no values below 0, the mean is shifted up from the peak of the distribution. See table 1 in the last link Rachel supplied for details.
I’ve had the opposite experience to Lee — I often talk much more easily about deep stuff online than in person.
Me too. Discussions with neighbors tend toward the familiar stuff–the weather, church, our kids, et.c I’m much more likely to get into an indepth political discussion with friends on-line. Most of the time, the people who congregate in various internet communities have already mastered the abc’s of the subject at hand. So you have the luxury of going straight to the more complicated analysis.
Well, I can have deep political discussion here electronically with y’all, but unless you’re under deeper cover than I think, nobody here on this blog is a close friend of mine in the flesh. But what I was thinking when I wrote my previous post was about when I talk about pretty personal life issues ‘n’ stuff like that – you know, like (not real examples), I think I need to find a new job, or OMG I think I’m pregnant with twins, or I think my supervisor is running a porn site from the office what’ll I do? For me, I can discuss things at a certain level over the phone or via e-mail, but when it comes to the real down’n’dirty extended discussion about how to tell Mom she has to go into an assisted care facility or something like that, I prefer to do it in person.
It’d be interesting to know how many of these people actually have the same amount of friends, or more people to talk to now with the Internet and technology advancing in general, but FEEL they have less, probably due to less in-person interactions now thanks to computers and cell phones. I notice that IS mentioned as a possibility at the end of the website, and it’s the first one I thought of because I have noticed it’s effect.
Also very interesting considering the promise of online networking sites like Myspace to give people greater networks.