homophily: a standalone construct

Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton coined the term homophily in 1954, in an analysis of friendship as a social process, to name a pattern they observed: people tend to form and keep social ties with others who resemble them. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James Cook gave the principle its modern consolidated statement in their 2001 Annual Review of Sociology survey, gathering decades of evidence that personal networks are homogeneous across characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, religion, education, occupation, and gender, so that similarity shapes ties of every kind, from marriage and friendship to work and advice. The construct separates two routes to this similarity: baseline homophily, the resemblance expected simply because the surrounding population is itself unevenly mixed, and inbreeding homophily, the additional resemblance beyond that baseline. Its landmark status in social network analysis rests on its scope: homophily is used to explain who meets whom, how information and behavior spread, and why social worlds stay segmented, and it is a construct researchers work to distinguish from social contagion, the alternative account in which shared behavior comes from ties rather than ties coming from shared traits.[1][2][3]

Unit

A network-level tendency, expressed as the degree to which connected individuals share an attribute relative to what chance mixing would produce

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Operationalized with assortativity or mixing indices computed on network data, or with homophily coefficients that compare observed same-attribute ties to those expected under random mixing