Network dynamics of ongoing social relationships

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of ongoing social relationships, revealing power-law response times, exponential relationship durations, and structural differences from accumulated contact networks.

Contribution

It introduces methods to analyze ongoing relationship networks and compares their structural properties to accumulated contact networks, highlighting key dynamical differences.

Findings

Response times follow a power-law distribution

Relationship durations decay exponentially

Ongoing contact networks have a power-law degree distribution

Abstract

Many recent large-scale studies of interaction networks have focused on networks of accumulated contacts. In this paper we explore social networks of ongoing relationships with an emphasis on dynamical aspects. We find a distribution of response times (times between consecutive contacts of different direction between two actors) that has a power-law shape over a large range. We also argue that the distribution of relationship duration (the time between the first and last contacts between actors) is exponentially decaying. Methods to reanalyze the data to compensate for the finite sampling time are proposed. We find that the degree distribution for networks of ongoing contacts fits better to a power-law than the degree distribution of the network of accumulated contacts do. We see that the clustering and assortative mixing coefficients are of the same order for networks of ongoing and accumulated contacts, and that the structural fluctuations of the former are rather large.