Research Data
In 1970 Dr. Granovetter submitted his doctoral dissertation to Harvard University, entitled "Changing Jobs: Channels of Mobility Information in a Suburban Community." The thesis of his dissertation illustrated the conception of weak ties. For his research, Dr. Granovetter crossed the Charles River to Newton, Massachusetts where he surveyed 282 professional, technical, and managerial workers in total. 100 were personally interviewed, in regards to the type of ties between the job changer and the contact person who provided the necessary information. Tie strength was measured in terms of how often they saw the contact person during the period of the job transition, using the following assignment:
- often = at least once a week
- occasionally = more than once a year but less than twice a week
- rarely = once a year or less
Of those who found jobs through personal contacts (N=54), 16.7% reported seeing their contact often, 55.6% reported seeing their contact occasionally, and 27.8% rarely. When asked whether a friend had told them about their current job, the most frequent answer was “not a friend, an acquaintance.” The conclusion from this study is that weak ties are an important resource in occupational mobility. When seen from a macro point of view, weak ties play a role in affecting social cohesion.
Read more about this topic: Interpersonal Ties
Famous quotes containing the words research and/or data:
“Feeling that you have to be the perfect parent places a tremendous and completely unnecessary burden on you. If weve learned anything from the past half-centurys research on child development, its that children are remarkably resilient. You can make lots of mistakes and still wind up with great kids.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in itall my life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)