The spatiality of personal networks in four countries : a comparative study

Acknowledging the relevance of social networks on (social) travel behavior, the objective of this paper is to study comparatively the distance patterns between the home locations of social contacts. Analyses are based on five recent personal network data collections from four countries: Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Chile. Multilevel models, which explicitly account for the hierarchical structure of the data sets, are used to study the role of the explanatory variables to understand the spatiality of social contacts. Modeling results suggest that alter’s characteristics (such as type of relationship, emotional closeness, and duration of the relationship) as well as personal network composition (alters with a certain relationship with the ego) constitute stronger predictors than ego’s socio-demographics across the countries. In addition, the comparative analyses suggest differences between countries on relevant key variables such as ego’s income and the ego-alter tie strength.