Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook

TL;DR

This study uses Facebook data to identify romantic partners within social networks by introducing a new measure called dispersion, which assesses the connectivity among mutual friends to accurately recognize strong social ties.

Contribution

The paper introduces the dispersion measure for tie strength and demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying romantic partners solely from network structure.

Findings

High accuracy in recognizing romantic partners using dispersion

Dispersion outperforms traditional tie strength measures

Method applicable to online social network analysis

Abstract

A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.