5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

A personal or egocentric network is the local set of contacts (the “alters”) – such as family members, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, etc. – with whom a focal individual (the “ego”) has a social relationship of interest. This relationship typically entails mutual acquaintance, social roles occupied by the ego and the alter, and the exchange of material or intangible resources. Alters may also know each other, creating various structures of connectivity around the ego. Personal networks are at the heart of social processes and outcomes in such diverse domains as family and friendship, social capital and social support, occupations and socioeconomic inequalities, social determinants of health, migration and immigrant incorporation, political behavior, and digital life and social media. This session aims to gather contributions that advance the sociological study of personal networks, their antecedents, and their consequences. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Personal networks as causes: influences on health and well-being, socioeconomic inequalities, attitudes, beliefs, norms, etc.
• Personal networks as consequences: effects of homophily and segregation, neighborhood and space, gender, race/ethnicity, and social class.
• Personal networks in processes of social influence, contagion, and diffusion.
• Personal networks in the study of social mechanisms, opportunities and constraints in goal-oriented action, the micro-macro link, and the emergence of group outcomes from aggregation processes.
• Methods of ego-network data collection, personal network techniques in large-scale probability surveys, mixed methods in personal network research.
• Advances in computational methods and statistical modeling of personal network data, including multilevel modeling and Exponential Random Graph Models.