Abstract
In the sociological literature, it is suggested that grand changes in the structure of modern western societies in the 19th and 20th century, resulted in low levels of overlap among social contexts nowadays, which means that people usually meet each network member in a single social context. In this contribution, I examine the overlap structure among social contexts in which people meet personal network members, thereby especially focusing on overlap between public contexts and private contexts. Next, because it is also suggested that low levels of context overlap result in a replacement of multiplex relationships by uniplex relationships, I examine the extent to which sharing multiple contexts affects multiplexity in personal relationships. The main conclusions, which are based on empirical tests on data from the second wave of The Survey of the Social Networks of the Dutch, are a) that private contexts are much more likely to overlap with other contexts than public contexts, and b) that sharing multiple contexts in general, but especially sharing multiple private contexts, has a substantial positive effect on multiplexity.
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Mollenhorst, G. (2008). Context Overlap and Multiplexity in Personal Relationships. In: Friemel, T.N. (eds) Why Context Matters. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91184-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91184-7_4
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