Benjamin Cornwell

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Cornell University

Objectives. Research shows that socially disadvantaged groups—especially African Americans and people of low socioeconomic status (SES)—experience more unstable social environments. I argue that this causes higher rates of turnover within their personal social networks. This is a particularly important issue among disadvantaged older adults, who ma...

Increasing research highlights heterogeneity in patterns of social network change, with growing evidence that these patterns are shaped in part by social structure. The role of social and structural neighborhood conditions in the addition and loss of kin and non-kin network members, however, has not been fully considered. In this paper, we argue th...

This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions. The application of SA in the social sci...

Background: The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) has collected 3 rounds of data on older adults' egocentric social networks. We describe the structure of network data collection for different components of the sample and the data that are available for those groups. We also describe survey techniques that were used to track...

Objective We examine whom, among her social network members, a new mother ranks as her most important source of advice for infant care practices and how the ranking of a network member depends on their connectedness to a mother's other network members. Background Previous research points to the influence of personal networks members' advice on par...

Background: An individual's personal social network influences behavior; one is more likely to adopt behaviors consistent with norms within the network to avoid social stigma. Personal social network types, which are associated with individual behaviors, have been identified for new mothers: exclusive (kin centric) and expansive (not kin centric)....

People 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...

Expanding on recent research on the transmission of COVID-19 via social networks, this article argues that exposure to familial and other close contacts who already have the disease may increase the severity of one’s subsequent illness. We hypothesize that having family members or close contacts who were diagnosed with COVID-19 before one’s own dia...

Background Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is employed to recruit populations that are hard-to-reach, “hidden,” or without a sampling frame. For new mothers (those with infants <6 months) in countries without national health care systems or registries, there is no sampling frame, and random samples may only be attained through costly strategies, e...

In normal times, the network ties that connect students on a college campus are an asset; during a pandemic, they can become a liability. Using pre-pandemic data from Cornell University, Weeden and Cornwell showed how co-enrollment in classes creates a “small world” network with high clustering, short path lengths, and multiple independent pathways...

Despite public awareness campaigns, some parents continue to engage in infant sleep practices that are considered risky by health experts, such as bedsharing or placing their infants on their stomachs. This study examines the role their social networks play in shaping parents' responsiveness to new information and/or suggestions about how they shou...

To slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, many universities shifted to online instruction and now face the question of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses transcript data from a medium-sized American university to describe three enrollment networks that connect students through classes, and in the process create so...

To slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, many universities shifted to online instruction and now face the question of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses transcript data from a medium-sized American university to describe three enrollment networks that connect students through classes and in the process create soc...

Objectives: To examine patterns of change in later-life social connectedness: (1) the extent and direction of changes in different aspects of social connectedness - including size, density, and composition of social networks, network turnover, and three types of community involvement; and (2) the sequential nature of these changes over time. Meth...

Social 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 struc...

Research on time use has seen several major developments in recent years. These include the adoption of exciting new technologies (e.g., smartphones, wearable Global Positioning System devices) that track behavior in real time, as well as a growing international database—the Multinational Time Use Study—that has surpassed one million days’ worth of...

Objective: To describe the structure of networks in a cohort of mothers and to analyze associations of social network characteristics and norms with infant sleep practices. Study design: We recruited a prospective cohort of mothers with infants <6 months of age from January 2015 to December 2016. Mothers completed a survey about their personal s...

Social-environmental factors may be associated with social network stability, which has implications for HIV acquisition. However, the link between social-environmental factors, network composition and HIV risk has not been examined previously among a city-population based sample of young Black men who have sex with Men (YBMSM). Respondent driven s...

The detection of structural cohesion is a key utility of social network analysis, but little work has been done to refine the detection of structural cohesion in two-mode networks. Most work on cohesion in two-mode networks either: (1) attempts to detect cohesion in such networks using one-mode projections (which can be problematic for reasons we d...

One reason to use sequence analysis in social research is to identify systematic differences in the structuring of ordered social phenomena across groups. This is often done via optimal matching analysis, discrepancy analysis, event-history analysis, or related approaches. These approaches can be supplemented with network-analytic approaches when s...

Social networks are often structured in such a way that there are gaps, or “structural holes,” between regions. Some actors are in the position to bridge or span these gaps, giving rise to individual advantages relating to brokerage, gatekeeping, access to non-redundant contacts, and control over network flows. The most widely used measures of a gi...

Objective The authors examine whether racial and socioeconomic factors influence older adults' likelihood of experiencing instability in their social network ties with their adult children. Background Recent work shows that socially disadvantaged older adults' social networks are more unstable and exhibit higher rates of turnover, perhaps due to g...

Significance Everyday life in modern society often seems unpredictable and disorganized. Much research has demonstrated the structured nature of time, though, by documenting trends in individuals’ time use or allocation. We expand on this by using sequence analysis methods to identify and describe common patterns with regard to how individuals sequ...

Older adults are disproportionately likely to experience the death or other loss of a close network member. An important question is how their social networks are shaped by these experiences during a period that is already characterized by major life-course transitions. We study this question using longitudinal data on egocentric networks from the...

Little work has examined how individuals' social affiliations-the venues in which they meet friends and engage in informal social interaction-influence their engagement with public health services. We investigate how links to these local places shape access to information and exposure to health-seeking behavior. Using longitudinal data from a respo...

Background It has been argued that the success of respondent-driven sampling (RDS) in generating unbiased estimates for epidemiologic outcomes depends on participants’ abilities to generate long referral chains. While this is thought to depend on the number of people participants know in the target population, this idea is rarely tested. Furthermor...

Incidence rate ratios from unweighted multivariate negative binomial regression model predicting (1) total size and (2) maximum chain length of the prospective RDS recruitment networks of MSM in the uConnect study 2013–2014 (N = 567)a. (DOCX)

Incidence rate ratios from multivariate negative binomial regression model predicting (1) total size and (2) maximum chain length of the prospective RDS recruitment networks of MSM in the uConnect study, 2013–2014 (N = 567)a. (DOCX)

The order of the authors in the published article is incorrect. The authors should appear as follows: J. Schneider, B. Cornwell, A. Jonas, R. Behler, N. Lancki, B. Skaathun, L. E. Young, E. Morgan, S. Michaels, R. Duvoisin, A. S. Khanna, S. Friedman, P. Schumm, E. Laumann, for the uConnect Study Team The authors regret the error.

Critical to the development of improved HIV elimination efforts is a greater understanding of how social networks and their dynamics are related to HIV risk and prevention. In this paper, we examine network stability of confidant and sexual networks among young black men who have sex with men (YBMSM). We use data from uConnect (2013–2016), a popula...

For close to two decades now, research on older adults' social connectedness has been expanding on conceptualizations of social integration that focus on roles and activities in order to further examine the nature of older adults' " social networks" A social network refers to a defined set of social actors - in this case, individuals - and the soci...

Background: Young Black men who have sex with men (YBMSM) are at highest risk for HIV seroconversion in the United States. Successful movement through the HIV care continuum is an important intervention for limiting onwards HIV transmission. Objective: Little data exists on how substances most commonly used by YBMSM, such as marijuana, are relat...

Few things are more private than sexual behavior. Yet scholars increasingly see sexual behavior as being shaped by the broad social networks of kin, friends, and other contacts in which individuals are embedded. This article describes research that considers the relevance of these social (not sexual) contacts to a wide range of sexual behaviors, in...

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, in...

This paper highlights the importance of the social networks perspective in social science research and describes the main approaches to measuring social networks and closely related phenomena - including social capital and kin networks - in existing household panel surveys. It then identifies cutting-edge techniques for collecting new data on socia...

Purpose The ability to analyze social action as it unfolds on micro time scales – particularly the 24-hour day – is central to understanding group processes. This chapter describes a new approach to this undertaking, which treats individuals’ involvement in specific activities at specific times as bases for: (1) sequential linkages between activiti...

Materials and methods • Respondent Driven Sampling was used to recruit 204 BMSM • Participants reported visit history with a diverse group of 9 Chicago health centers offering HIV services • Multiple linear regression determined association between characteristics and cumulative health center awareness and utilization. • Multiple regression quadrat...

Amuch-theorized but seldom-tested theory is that elites achieve cohesion via the social network they form through their affiliations with local clubs, religious institutions, civic groups, and other voluntary associations. But few scholars have considered how increasing diversity with respect to elites' gender, race, and social class may undermine...

Objectives: This article describes new longitudinal data on older adults' egocentric social networks collected by the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP). We describe a novel survey technique that was used to record specific personnel changes that occurred within respondents' networks during the 5-year study period, and we make...

Social network data can be collected in a number of ways. Direct physical observation is one approach, which may involve recording a person's physical contacts during a given period of time. The survey approach is favored over other methods because it is less time-intensive than observational techniques, and they allow for data to be collected in a...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, August 2007. Includes bibliographical references.

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...

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 communit...

Objectives: We evaluated network mixing and influences by network members upon Black men who have sex with men. Methods: We conducted separate social and sexual network mixing analyses to determine the degree of mixing on risk behaviors (e.g., unprotected anal intercourse [UAI]). We used logistic regression to assess the association between a ne...

In the United States, black men who have sex with men (BMSM) are at highest risk for HIV infection and are at high risk for limited health service utilization. We describe HIV health center (HHC) affiliation network patterns and their potential determinants among urban BMSM. The Men's Assessment of Social and Risk Network instrument was used to eli...

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 nee...

Research shows that unemployment reduces access to health care and vaccines and increases financial difficulty, family conflict, and other sources of stress that are known to suppress immune function. In addition, seasonal unemployment rates parallel seasonal influenza activity. Following a theory that argues that macroeconomic conditions affect po...

Most studies of older adults' social networks focus on their access to dense networks that yield access to social support. This paper documents gender differences in the extent to which older adults maintain a related, but distinct, form of social capital-bridging potential, which involves serving as a tie between two unconnected parties and thus b...

Research on older adults’ social integration usually focuses on time-indefinite access to social support, community involvement, and network connectedness. Little research has examined the actual amount of social contact older adults have on a typical day. The author uses nationally representative data on 92,698 adults—collected in the 2003-2009 Am...

This article combines relational perspectives on gender identity with social network structural perspectives on health to understand men's sexual functioning. The authors argue that network positions that afford independence and control over social resources are consistent with traditional masculine roles and may therefore affect men's sexual perfo...

This paper describes the rationale behind the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project's (NSHAP) social networks module, data collection procedures, and the measurement of several egocentric network properties. This includes a discussion of network size, composition, volume of contact with network members, density, and bridging potential. Da...

Objectives: Much work in social gerontology has examined older adults' social connectedness, but we know little about the extent to which older adults occupy positions of power and independence in their networks. The author uses health and life-course frameworks to understand older adults' prospects of occupying bridging positions between otherwise...

Bridges that span structural holes are often explained in terms of the entrepreneurial personalities or rational motivations of brokers, or structural processes that lead to the intersection of social foci. I argue that the existence and use of bridges in interpersonal networks also depends on individuals' health. Poor health may make it more diffi...

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 ac...

For decades, scholars have wrestled with the notion that old age is characterized by social isolation. However, there has been no systematic, nationally representative evaluation of this possibility in terms of social network connectedness. In this paper, the authors develop a profile of older adults' social integration with respect to nine dimensi...

Although influence hierarchies are a crucial part of social life, the process by which they emerge is not well-understood. We propose that status characteristics and social identity processes work together to generate social hierarchies. Visible (readily observable) status characteristics restrict information and opportunities for interaction, crea...

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 cong...

Although older adults have a particular need for social ties, they are more at risk of being socially isolated. Age-related declines in social connectedness are typically regarded as a function of either voluntary withdrawal from social relationships or the negative effects of modern social policies and programs. Both explanations assume that older...

This theoretical analysis uses three relationships between individual and organizational performance to help explain when organizations will use different labor markets to organize employment and when they will use different hiring networks. Granovetter's [Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–13...

Much research on adolescent delinquency pivots on the notion of peer influence. The peer effect that is typically employed emphasizes the transmission of behaviors and attitudes between adolescents who are directly linked. In this paper, we argue that to rely solely on those direct social ties to capture peer influence oversimplifies the realities...

The American jury is heralded as an institution that is simultaneously representative and egalitarian. However, jury studies conducted 50 years ago found that white, upper-class men dominate jury deliberations, presumably due to their higher status outside of the jury room. Logistic regression analysis of dyadic influence inside the jury room updat...

I build on previous findings in disaster research with a quantitative examination of individual-level fatality risk in a fire evacuation. Using data concerning people who were present at the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire of 1977, I show that the probability of an individual perishing in the fire was a function of the relational and ecological prop...

Freeman's (1979) measure of closeness centrality is valuable in network analysis, but its use is limited to connected networks. In this paper, I describe an approach for calculating actor closeness centrality that circumvents the problem of disconnectedness. I show how the complement, GC, of a disconnected network, G, can be used to obtain weights...

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....

This research examines the role magazines play as part of popular culture in the reproduction of inequality. We analyze statistics and images that magazine publishers make available to advertisers through media kits (n = 63). We hypothesize that race, class, and gender logic within the industry affect what information is presented to advertisers an...

I build on previous findings in disaster research with a quantitative examination of individual-level fatality risk in a fire evacuation. Using data concerning people who were present at the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire of 1977,1 show that the probability of an individual perishing in the fire was a function of the relational and ecological prope...

Because the ecology of games (Long, 1958) is generally a qualitative perspective, it rarely has been applied as a means of empirically analyzing the management of community affairs. Here we pair the perspective's emphasis on key actors' goals with a conceptualization of local issues as reference points for the structure of local games. To illustrat...

Although social support is a static concept, its basic dynamic properties — decay, growth, and staticity — involve different underlying social processes, and therefore have differential effects on mental health. Using a sample of 11,835 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I conduct a series of regression analyses...

This research aims to analyze the relationship between sport and the gender order in society by focusing on sport-related images (N = 312) found in popular nonsport men's and women's magazines (N = 46). We find that sport images are often found in both men's and women's nonsport magazines, though these images are more common in magazines that targe...

Questions the idea of moral panic and delineates the rudiments of an alternate model of deviance construction and moral public discourse, using LSD prohibition as a working example. In developing their model, the authors draw on research on people in disasters and collective behavior. In keeping with these traditions, they argue that, when faced wi...

This study compares reported romantic relationships of chat room users in cyberspace vs. in face-to-face relationships in everyday contexts (“realspace”). As hypothesized, involvement — particularly commitment and seriousness — tended to be lower in cyberspace than in realspace romantic relationships, and misrepresentation — specifically of age and...

This paper evaluates behavior among individuals during the sinking of the M/V Estonia in 1994, which caused the deaths of 851 people. Survival rates of those on board indicate a drastically higher proportion of men surviving than women (.22 vs .05), and a higher proportion of crew members surviving than regular passengers (.23 vs .12). These patter...