What moving house does to a network

Longitudinal surveys find that moving is one of the events most strongly associated with the renewal of a personal network, more so than a job change within the same city. In France, the panel of young adults from the Caen region followed by Claire Bidart and colleagues documented these recompositions over several years, work taken up in La vie en réseau, published in 2011 with Alain Degenne and Michel Grossetti.

The loss bears mainly on relationships sustained by daily co-presence, and far less on long-standing ones, consistent with the findings on resumption after interruption.

Studies following people after a move measure gradual rebuilding, whose speed depends heavily on available contexts: employment, study, the presence of school-age children, collective activities. In adulthood, they play the role that school played in youth.

Those contexts are not equally accessible. People arriving without a job, without a school-age child and without collective activity rebuild more slowly, which surveys find regularly. Arriving in a city does not produce relationships by itself: it produces them through the places it opens up.

Relationships kept after a move are more often the closest ones, and maintaining them runs through contacts whose frequency falls over time without reported closeness falling at the same rate. A friend left behind in the old city may be called only a few times a year and still be named among the closest.

That gap between frequency and closeness is one of the arguments against using frequency as the sole measure of a tie's intensity.

Imposed moves, linked to a lost job, a separation or a housing situation, produce less favourable trajectories in surveys than chosen moves.

The boundary between the two is blurred, however. A move accepted for a job may be experienced as a constraint, and an imposed move may open new contexts: the distinction depends on the starting situation as much as on the destination.

Analyses distinguishing the two situations are rare, and most available work concerns skilled mobile populations, which limits the reach of published conclusions.

People who have moved several times show networks that are more geographically dispersed and a smaller share of recently met relationships.

Work on highly mobile populations finds an acquired competence at entering relationships, without that compensating the measured dispersion, which produces broad and sparse networks. Such networks are not poorer for it: they are organised differently, with fewer relationships who know one another.