Where does clique collide?

An informal, cohesive group of people bound by mutual familiarity, liking, and shared norms, forming a recognizable unit inside a larger community or organization. Warner and Lunt's 1941 study of a New England town, The Social Life of a Modern Community, used clique as a technical term for such an intimate association and mapped how these groups stratified the town. Homans's 1950 The Human Group then made the clique a building block of social theory by analyzing how interaction, activity, and sentiment hold small groups together. The referent here is a real human association held together by feeling and contact, not a formal set of mutually linked points in a graph and not the age-bounded friendship group studied in adolescence.[1][2]

Unit

One informal group of mutually familiar people within a community, identified as a bounded set of members

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through observation of who interacts with whom, interviews, and membership lists, and later through sociometric ties

A set of vertices in a graph in which every pair is directly connected, so the group forms a complete subgraph; a maximal clique is one that cannot be enlarged by adding another adjacent vertex. Luce and Perry's 1949 paper A method of matrix analysis of group structure introduced this graph term, defining a clique as a maximal complete subgraph and giving a matrix method to detect one. The definition is purely combinatorial: it depends only on which points are joined, so it applies to molecules, schedules, or any network, and finding the largest clique is a classic hard computational problem. This referent is an abstract structural object, not a human group held together by affection and not a developmental peer formation.[3]

Unit

A set of vertices that are all pairwise adjacent, counted by its size (the number of vertices)

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Found by algorithms on the graph's adjacency matrix that enumerate complete subgraphs and the maximum clique

A small, tightly knit friendship group of roughly three to nine adolescents who spend time together and share activities, sitting below the larger, looser crowd in the structure of teenage social life. Dunphy's 1963 study The Social Structure of Urban Adolescent Peer Groups introduced this two-level model and defined the clique as the smaller intimate unit within it. Later developmental work, such as Cairns and colleagues' 1988 research on peer networks, measured such groups directly and linked membership to behavior and adjustment. The referent is an age-specific peer structure studied in child and adolescent development, distinct from the general community clique of sociology and from the formal complete subgraph of graph theory.[4][5]

Unit

One adolescent friendship group of about three to nine members who regularly associate

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified from peer nominations and observation of who affiliates with whom, then grouped by social-network methods