Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PATCHWORK (A Network Science Approach to Social Cohesion in European Societies)
Reporting period: 2023-04-01 to 2024-09-30
Social cohesion strengthens societies, enforces their prosperity, and reduces exclusions and tensions. Unfortunately, in Europe, it is being tested by increasing diversity, inequalities and divisions. Moreover, research on its most fundamental elements, intimate and superficial human relationships, is neglected as it is considered too complex. The EU-funded PATCHWORK project aims to create a revolutionary network-scientific approach to investigate structural cohesion empirically by hybridising two strands of network research. For the first time, a large-scale, cross-national survey comprising samples from four countries will evaluate acquaintanceship networks across different categorical fault lines (like citizenship or religion) to elucidate how networks can enforce cohesion in societies.
In the first half of the project, the PATCHWORK team has built the theoretical framework for the study, aided by literature reviews and expert consultation. Furthermore, it has designed and tested the novel methodologies that are essential for the project's success: the survey instruments that collect the data on individuals' networks, the statistical procedures to estimate the size, composition, and structure of individual acquaintanceship networks based on these data, the simulation methods that generate the society-wide networks compatible with the individual responses, and the agent-based models that further test the causal mechanisms of cohesion based on those empirically grounded simulated networks. It has conducted repeated interviews with 50 people from all walks of life in Barcelona, which showed the feasibility of the survey approach, but also detected several challenges that have been tackled afterwards. The team has used various secondary databases to test the robustness of the estimation and ABM methods. These results have been discussed in international conferences and seminars across Europe and the US, which has given further feedback. Altogether, this phase has laid the groundwork for the second half of the project.
With the new methodologies, the team will collect the cross-national survey data in the second half of the project, which will provide the empirical foundations for the study. For this stage, we will ask a representative sample of 6000 European citizens from four countries to participate in personal interviews. Subsequently, we will analyze their responses using statistical analysis, simulation, and agent-based modeling with the prepared methodologies. The results will show us the cohesiveness of the social fabric of four European countries across different social boundaries of ethnicity, social class, religion, and political orientation, as well as their intersections. Furthermore, it will highlight the mechanisms at the relational, individual, and country levels that explain these patterns. It will also associate these patterns with individuals' solidarity and trust, two major "subjective" indicators of cohesion. The team will further investigate how the results can best be used to strengthen social cohesion.