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 2018-2020 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 and Marcum 2017; Sekara, Stopczynski, and Lehmann 2016), they tend to change slowly over time in periods of social stability (Wrzus et al. 2013). In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic was a massive disturbance in the social environment, similar to the effect a natural disaster such as a hurricane on social networks, but on a much broader scale (Bertogg and Koos 2022). For Chinese immigrants in the U.S., 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 U.S. which affected migrants' sense of inclusion and collective identity in their host society (Li, English, and Kulich 2021; Stolte et al. 2022). 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