The cultural construction of personal relationships

Abstract

Network analysis aspires to be “anticategorical,” yet its basic units—relationships—are, usually readily categorized entities with labels like “friendship,” “love,” or “patronage.” In, this way, a nontrivial cultural typification underlies the very building blocks of most network analyses. Despite work showing that a specific “type of tie” often stands in for quite heterogeneous empirical phenomena, this typification is seldom challenged in research practice. This article expands on recent efforts to more adequately theorize ties by further developing and arguing for the concept of relationship frames—cultural models that stabilize relational expectations. I suggest that such frames are rooted in regularities in the duality of dyad and content. Building on this idea, I develop a formal notion of frame ambiguity—the extent to which the actions and symbols designating a relationship index a variety of frames rather than just one. Putting these ideas to analytical use, I inductively identify relationship frames from the content of 1.2 million relationships between characters in fiction writing. I conclude with an exploratory investigation of some of the conditions under which ties in fiction writing display variation in frame ambiguity.