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Social sequence analysis includes a diverse and rapidly growing body of methods that social scientists have developed to help study complex ordered social processes, including chains of transitions, trajectories and other ordered phenomena. Social sequence analysis is not limited by content or time scale and can be used in many different fields, including sociology, communication, information science and psychology. Social Sequence Analysis aims to bring together both foundational and recent theoretical and methodological work on social sequences from the last thirty years. A unique reference book for a new generation of social scientists, this book will aid demographers who study life-course trajectories and family histories, sociologists who study career paths or work/family schedules, communication scholars and micro-sociologists who study conversation, interaction structures and small-group dynamics, as well as social epidemiologists

This article shows how maintaining social relationships can be a daily hassle that has implications for the stress process, depending on how often individuals transition, or "switch," between various social roles and social settings throughout the day. I use nationally representative time-diary data on 7,662 respondents from the 2010 American Time Use Survey to measure individual rates of switching behavior and to examine how it relates to perceived stress. Regression analysis shows that net of how many social roles they play and settings they visit on a given day, individuals who switch more frequently between these elements report higher levels of stress. This finding holds for women but not men, suggesting that switching dynamics are disproportionately stressful for women. I close by discussing the implications of the findings for research on gender and health.

The role social network structure plays in facilitating flows of support between spouses is often overlooked. This study examined whether levels of support between spouses depended on the degree of overlap between spouses' networks. Network overlap may enhance spouses' support capacities by increasing their understanding of each other's support needs and their ability to coordinate support for each other. Data on 1,490 married older adults from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project were examined. Analyses revealed that when one's spouse had more contact with one's other network members, one was more likely to (a) view the spouse as a reliable source of support, (b) open up to the spouse, and (c) discuss health issues with the spouse. These results suggest that spousal support is not only a function of relationship quality or obligations—it also is a structural phenomenon that depends on spouses' connectedness to each other's networks.

The new economic sociology contends that personal relationships and trust play key roles in structuring economic activity. Max Weber's 1906 essay, `Churches and Sects,' epitomizes the new economic sociology argument. The piece not only details the origins of and individual motivations behind social capital formation in sects, it also shows how congregation-based social capital facilitated the emergence of capitalism in America. I supplement Weber's work with that of contemporary scholars to provide social-capital-based explanations of capitalism in northern Italy, the Netherlands, and England, all emphasizing the significance of credit.

Little is known about how work schedules affect social connectedness beyond family relationships. The authors use detailed time diary data from 12,140 respondents in the 2008 through 2010 American Time Use Surveys to examine how work schedules affect six forms of community involvement. Results show that night and evening shift work reduces community involvement, but only on weekdays. Daytime shifts reduce community involvement when they are very short, when they involve working from 8 to 5 instead of from 7 to 4, and when they are on weekends. These results call into question tacit assumptions about how shift work affects workers' social lives.

AbstractPeople in disaster and emergency situations (e.g., building fires) tend to adhere to the social obligations and expectations that are embedded in their preexisting roles and relationships. Accordingly, people survive or perish in groups—specifically, alongside those to whom they were connected before the situation emerged. This article uses social network analysis to expand on this collective behavior account. Specifically, we consider structural heterogeneity with respect to the internal configurations of social ties that compose small groups facing these situations together. Some groups are composed of cohesive subsets of members who can split off from each other during evacuation without violating their group's internal role-based expectations. We argue that groups that possess this "breakaway" structure can respond to emergencies more flexibly. We explore this using data from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire of 1977, which killed 165 people. Our data include 303 groups ("parties") that consisted of 746 people who were present in the dining room where most of the fatalities occurred. Fatality rates were significantly lower in groups that were internally structured such that they could split up in different ways during the escape while still maintaining their strongest social bonds.

AbstractSocial network analysis has been one of the most influential scientific revolutions of the past century. Its success has been due, in part, to its methodological sophistication and the emphasis it places on identifying and clearly depicting features of social structure. As such, social network analysis is often viewed in stark contrast to the structuralist paradigm that dominated the social sciences prior to its rise – structural–functionalism - in the mid-20th century. In this paper, we highlight important connections that exist between the key assumptions of social network analysis and the key tenets of some of the most influential structural-functional theories – especially those of Robert K. Merton and Talcott Parsons and their collaborators and followers. We reveal a substantial affinity between some of their most influential ideas and contemporary analysis of social networkdynamics, in particular, and several ways in which their work could inform promising advances in this line of research. Our ultimate goal is to highlight the prospect of using these theories to guide future analyses of the dynamics of large social systems and the sequences of real-time action that compose them.

Social capital theory suggests that individuals can access resources through their relationships with others. While research in this area typically focuses on the potential benefits of having high-status network alters, the authors emphasize that relationships with experts, in particular, provide access to specialized knowledge. Expertise may be accessed through formal, contractual means. But individuals who have an expert within their network of close family and friends may benefit from more convenient and lower cost expertise. The authors explore the prevalence and nature of expert contacts within individuals' social networks using data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys. About a quarter of Americans identify an expert among their network contacts. Racial minorities and members of the lower- and working-classes have less access to experts within their personal networks, however, and minorities have become particularly disadvantaged over the past two decades in terms of both overall and informal access to expertise. The authors urge further research to examine the causes of disparities in social network ties to experts and their implications for processes of social stratification.

Prevailing conceptions of organizational embeddedness emphasize linkages to exchange partners via elites and contracts. What is neglected, the authors argue, is the nature and potential impact from the voluntary associations of rank-and-file members with the panoply of organizations in their daily lives, including churches, PTAs, and sports teams. The functions of these organizations provide contexts in which individuals trade information and form opinions about organizations and their members. By participating, individuals embed their own organizations in a broader organizational culture. This article treats the embeddedness of unions in the interorganizational network as a factor that has impacted and varied with the decline of organized labor. Organizational affiliation networks containing 18,263 individuals, drawn from the 1974-1994 General Social Survey data, show the isolation of unions in American organizational culture despite their relatively high rates of membership. Chronic aspects of the problem include union members' lack of nonunion voluntary association membership in general and the particularly low embeddedness of the organizations with which they affiliate.