The ties that bind: Linking religious organizational segregation to the individual level closure of close friendship network's

Abstract

Understanding the consequences of organizational membership has long been of concern to social scientists and the degree to which these belongings affect individual behaviors is often at the heart of this concernment. This study introduces a conceptual framework through which structural conditions associated with religious segregation is examined in relation to its manifestation as micro-level consequences. The literature is spattered with acknowledgements of segregation in religion at the organizational level through the proclamation that religion is “Divided by Faith” and that it creates “Closed Communities”. Drawing on data from the Panel Study on American Race and Ethnicity (PS-ARE), these conditions are linked to variations in the diversity of individual-level small group social networks, nested within a multidimensional, and newly developed, measurement of religiosity as an indicator of the strength of the tie the individual has to the organization to which they belong. The results suggest that the strength of the tie one feels with their religious organization is both multidimensional and denominationally specific in its explanation of variations in the diversity of close friendship networks. At a broader level these results suggest a linkage of micro behaviors to macro conditions that exists in a top-down hierarchy in which individual behaviors are shaped by structural conditions, but to what degree depends on the strength of the relationship between person and organization.