Citation

Hallinan MT. Soc. Netw. 1978; 1(2): 193-210.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1978, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/0378-8733(78)90019-9

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper poses two questions about the process of friendship formation: what is the relative stability of asymmetric and mutual friendship dyads and what is the nature of change in asymmetric dyads over time? These questions are examined in longitudinal sociometric data from five elementary classes. Change in friendship choices is shown to be at least partially embeddable as a continuous time, stationary Markov process and the unique Q matrices governing the process are determined. The findings show that unreciprocated friendship choices of the children in the sample are less stable than reciprocated choices and that their unreciprocated choices tend to be withdrawn rather than reciprocated over time.