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Someone To Talk To reveals the often counter-intuitive nature of social support, showing that Americans often take pains to avoid close friends and family--their "strong ties"--when deciding on whom to rely. In contrast, they often confide in "weak ties," as the need for understanding or empathy trumps their fear of misplaced trust. Amid a growing wave of big data and large-scale network analysis, Mario L. Small returns to the basic questions of who we connect with, how, and why, upending decades of conventional wisdom on how we should think about and analyze social networks.
List of contents
- Preface
- PART I: The Question
- Introduction
- 1. Confidants
- PART II: The First Year
- 2. Weak- Tie Confidants
- 3. Beyond Named Confidants
- 4. Incompatible Expectations
- 5. Relevance and Empathy
- 6. Because They Were There
- PART III: Beyond Graduate Students
- 7. Empirical Generalizability
- 8. Theoretical Generalizability
- A Final Word
- PART IV: Appendices
- Appendix A: Qualitative Analysis
- Appendix B: Quantitative Analysis
- Notes
- References
- Index
About the author
Mario L. Small, Grafstein Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, is an expert on poverty, personal networks, cities, and social science methods. He is the author of Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio and Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life.
Summary
Winner of the James Coleman Award for Best Book from the Rationality and Society section of the American Sociological Society
Winner of the Outstanding Recent Contribution from the Social Psychology section of the American Sociological Association
Winner of the Best Publication Award from the Mental Health section of the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, PROSE Book Award, Cultural Anthropology and Sociology, from the Association of American Publishers
When people are facing difficulties, they often feel the need for a confidant. How do they decide on whom to rely? In Someone To Talk To, Mario Luis Small follows a group of graduate students as they cope with stress, overwork, self-doubt, failure, relationships, children, health care, and poverty. He unravels how they decide whom to turn to for support. And he then confirms his findings based on representative national data on adult Americans. Small shows that rather than consistently relying on their "strong ties," Americans often take pains to avoid close friends and family, as these relationships are both complex and fraught with expectations. In contrast, they often confide in "weak ties," as the need for understanding or empathy trumps their fear of misplaced trust. In fact, people may find themselves confiding in acquaintances and even strangers unexpectedly, without having reflected on the consequences. Amid a growing wave of big data and large-scale network analysis, Small returns to the basic questions of whom we connect with, how, and why, upending decades of conventional wisdom on how we should think about and analyze social networks.
Additional text
Mario Small's book Someone to Talk To turns received wisdom on its head in several ways - reorienting us to the role of weak ties in contrast to strong ones, moving us beyond network structure to practices and norms embedded in the networks we inhabit, and focusing our attention on empathy and the ways in which we find it. The book is a tour de force."
