A Theory of Strong Ties, Weak Ties, and Activity Behavior: Leisure Activity Variety and Frequency

Abstract

A social network and personal social capital perspective has recently been applied in studies of travel and activity behavior. In this paper, a theory of activity behavior was developed inductively from sociological principles about social capital and the creation of social networks. This theory focused on the quantity of strong social ties and the diversity of weak social ties to describe differences in leisure activity variety and frequency. The theory was applied to a case study on participation in leisure activity in the United States with data from the Personal Networks and Community Survey. The size of the respondents’ core networks and the diversity of their contacts were found to be correlated positively with the variety and frequency of their activities. In addition, endogeneity because of correlations between network diversity and social personalities was accounted for with a two-step estimation procedure. The results showed that inclusion of a count of strong ties and the diversity of weak ties significantly increased the model fit and supported the theory’s hypothesis. The results also showed the biases that could be exhibited in analyses that ignored the effects of social networks. The inclusion of social networks helped to account for additional heterogeneity in socioeconomic groups (race, income, marital status, and education) in this case study.