Beyond and Below Racial Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on Facebook

A notable feature of U.S. social networks is their high degree of racial homogeneity, which is often attributed to racial homophily--the preference for associating with individuals of the same racial background. The authors unpack racial homogeneity using a theoretical framework that distinguishes between various tie formation mechanisms and their effects on the racial composition of networks, exponential random graph modeling that can disentangle these mechanisms empirically, and a rich new data set based on the Facebook pages of a cohort of college students. They first show that racial homogeneity results not only from racial homophily proper but also from homophily among coethnics of the same racial…