Homophily: Measures and Meaning

Abstract

Homophily, the tendency to associate with similar others, is a fundamental pattern underlying human relationships. Although scholars largely agree on the definition of homophily, their empirical measures of it vary widely. This both raises the question of whether everyone is studying the same phenomenon, and suggests that our understanding of homophily is incomplete. To address this question, we examined the homophily literature from 1954 through 2018, and constructed a typology that includes the empirical measures most commonly used. We found that these measures tend to neglect the meaning that people attribute to and derive from homophilous relationships, in three ways. First, measures often do not capture how individuals’ interactions with others influence their sense of the world—how social constructions affect meaning. Second, measures often do not capture whether individuals interpret and attach importance to their associations or similarities the same way researchers do. Finally, measures often do not capture the meaning-related ambiguities introduced by studies of multiple types of social contexts, associations, and similarities. Since homophily remains a central construct in social science, this divergence between measures and meaning suggests a need for refinement.