The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on network dynamics among Chinese immigrants in the United States

We use longitudinal data on the social networks of Chinese immigrants in the United States from 2018 to 2020 to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication frequency and friendship formation. Understanding the pandemic's effect on social networks is important because, while individual social networks are always in flux (Schaefer & Marcum, The Oxford handbook of social networks, 2017 and 254; Sekara et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 2016 and 9977), they tend to change slowly over time in periods of social stability (Wrzus et al., Psychological Bulletin, 139, 2013 and 53). In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic was a massive disturbance in the social environment, similar to the effect of a natural disaster such as a hurricane on social networks, but on a much broader scale (Bertogg & Koos, Frontiers in Sociology, 74, 2021). For Chinese immigrants in the United States, the social disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic was magnified because, in addition to the social isolation caused by lockdowns and social distancing, there was a dramatic rise in anti-Chinese discrimination and hate crimes in the United States which affected migrants' sense of inclusion and collective identity in their host society (Li et al., PLoS One, 16, 2021 and e0259866; Stolte et al., Social Science and Medicine – Mental Health, 2, 2022 and 100159). By examining how migrant networks changed and adapted to this altered macro-level social environment, we can better understand how micro and macro-level factors interact to affect network changes in general. The findings indicate that while stress during the pandemic affected the level of social network communication, the process of new tie formation to natives appears to be relatively unaffected.

Duke Scholars

Author M. Giovanna Merli Sanford School of Public Policy