Network of families in a contemporary population: regional and cultural assortativity

Abstract

Using a large dataset with individual-level demographic information of 60,000 families in contemporary Finland, we analyse the variation and cultural assortativity in a network of families. Families are considered as vertices and unions between males and females who have a common child and belong to different families are considered as edges in such a network of families. The sampled network is a collection of many disjoint components with the largest connected component being dominated by families rooted in one specific region. We characterize the network in terms of the basic structural properties and then explore the network transitivity and assortativity with regards to regions of origin and linguistic identity. Transitivity is seen to result from linguistic homophily in the network. Overall, our results demonstrate that geographic proximity and language strongly influence the structuring of network.