Search

Changes in U.S. migration during the COVID-19 pandemic show that many moved to less populated cities from larger cities, deviating from previous trends. In this study, building on prior work in the literature showing that the abundance of family ties is inversely related to population size, we analyze these migration changes with a focus on the crucial, yet overlooked factor of extended family. Employing two large-scale data sets, census microdata and mobile phone GPS relocation data, we show a collection of empirical results that paints a picture of migration change affected by kin. Namely, we find that people migrated closer to family at higher rates after the COVID-19 pandemic started. Moreover, even controlling for factors such as population density and cost of living, we find that changes in net in-migration tended to be larger and positive in cities with larger proportions of people who can be parents to adult children (our proxy for parental family availability, which is also inversely related to population size). Our study advances the demography-disaster nexus and amplifies ongoing literature highlighting the role of broader kinship systems in large-scale socioeconomic phenomena., Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures

People interact face-to-face on a frequent basis if (i) they live nearby and (ii) make the choice to meet. The first constitutes an availability of social ties; the second a propensity to interact with those ties. Despite being distinct social processes, most large-scale human interaction studies overlook these separate influences. Here, we study trends of interaction, availability, and propensity across US cities for a critical, abundant, and understudied type of social tie: extended family that live locally in separate households. We observe a systematic decline in interactions as a function of city population, which we attribute to decreased non-coresident local family availability. In contrast, interaction propensity and duration are either independent of or increase with city population. The large-scale patterns of availability and interaction propensity we discover, derived from analyzing the American Time Use Survey and Pew Social Trends Survey data, unveil previously-unknown effects on several social processes such as the effectiveness of pandemic-related social interventions, drivers affecting residential choice, and the ability of kin to provide care to family., Comment: 29 pages, 3 figures

Individuals who interact with each other in social networks often exchange ideas and influence each other's opinions. A popular approach to study the spread of opinions on networks is by examining bounded-confidence models (BCMs), in which the nodes of a network have continuous-valued states that encode their opinions and are receptive to other nodes' opinions when they lie within some confidence bound of their own opinion. In this paper, we extend the Deffuant--Weisbuch (DW) model, which is a well-known BCM, by examining the spread of opinions that coevolve with network structure. We propose an adaptive variant of the DW model in which the nodes of a network can (1) alter their opinions when they interact with neighboring nodes and (2) break connections with neighbors based on an opinion tolerance threshold and then form new connections following the principle of homophily. This opinion tolerance threshold determines whether or not the opinions of adjacent nodes are sufficiently different to be viewed as `discordant'. Using numerical simulations, we find that our adaptive DW model requires a larger confidence bound than a baseline DW model for the nodes of a network to achieve a consensus opinion. In one region of parameter space, we observe `pseudo-consensus' steady states, in which there exist multiple subclusters of an opinion cluster with opinions that differ from each other by a small amount. In our simulations, we also examine the importance of early-time dynamics and nodes with initially moderate opinions for achieving consensus. Additionally, we explore the effects of coevolution on the convergence time of our BCM., Comment: accepted by Journal of Complex Networks; further cosmetic polishing from the last version