Recognizing Modes of Acculturation in Personal Networks of Migrants

Abstract

An individual's personal network encodes social contacts as well as relations among them. Personal networks are therefore considered to be characteristic and meaningful variables of individuals-supplementing more traditional characteristics such as age, gender, race, or job position. We analyze an ensemble of several hundred personal networks of migrants using a recently introduced classification method. As a result, individuals are partitioned into groups defined by similarity of their personal networks, and abstract summaries of classes are obtained. From the analysis we can conclude that Berry's modes of acculturation feature prominently in the empirical data.