The meaning of closeness to women and/or LGBTQ+ physicists: a social network analysis

TL;DR

This study qualitatively and quantitatively explores how women and LGBTQ+ physicists perceive and experience closeness in their social relationships, highlighting trust and support as key factors.

Contribution

It combines qualitative interviews with a social network analysis to define and analyze closeness among physicists, emphasizing trust and support as central elements.

Findings

Trust, relaxed boundaries, reliance, and support define closeness.

Family, partners, friends, and professional contacts are seen as closest.

Trust and confiding are especially important in these relationships.

Abstract

'Closeness' is well-defined as a quantitative measure of centrality in social network analysis (SNA), but it is not as well defined qualitatively as a description of social relationships. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of 'closeness' as it is defined both implicitly and explicitly in interviews with 100 women and/or LGBTQ+ PhD physicists. The interviews include a social network construction component, and we define a quantitative network parameter that serves as a proxy for closeness, which we examine in relation to attributes of network members. We find that physicists in this sample see trust, relaxed boundaries, reliance, and support as concepts that most directly define closeness in their relationships. Consistent interaction, positive affect, and commonalities are also often present in (and in some cases, defining of) these relationships. From the quantitative analysis, we find that these physicists tend to view family and partners, friends, and professional friends as comprising their closest relationships. These results are consistent with other studies which have sought to define closeness qualitatively, but the prevalence of trust in this dataset in particular suggests that these physicists see the ability to confide as uniquely important in their relationships. We make recommendations to institutions supporting and employing physicists on how to better support gender and sexual minority (GSM) physicists going forward, and we believe these results help us gain a better understanding of how GSM physicists find success in physics despite the barriers they face due to their identities.