Network of families in a contemporary population: regional and cultural assortativity

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large Finnish family network to understand how regional and linguistic factors influence social connections, revealing strong effects of geography and language on network structure.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of regional and cultural assortativity in a large-scale family network using demographic data.

Findings

Network is composed of many disjoint components with a dominant regional cluster.

Linguistic homophily contributes to network transitivity.

Geography and language significantly influence network structure.

Abstract

Using a large dataset with individual-level demographic information of 60,000 families in contemporary Finland, we analyse the variation and cultural assortativity in a network of families. Families are considered as vertices and unions between males and females who have a common child and belong to different families are considered as edges in such a network of families. The sampled network is a collection of many disjoint components with the largest connected component being dominated by families rooted in one specific region. We characterize the network in terms of the basic structural properties and then explore the network transitivity and assortativity with regards to regions of origin and linguistic identity. Transitivity is seen to result from linguistic homophily in the network. Overall, our results demonstrate that geographic proximity and language strongly influence the structuring of network.