About

About the PATCHWORK project

As European societies become increasingly unequal, diverse, and polarised, concerns about social cohesion are growing. In this context, it is striking that much research on social cohesion has largely ignored one of its core dimensions: social relationships. Broad social networks that connect each individual to hundreds of acquaintances through both intimate and superficial ties have long been assumed to bind societies together and foster community and solidarity. Yet while such networks are increasingly studied using administrative registers and digital trace data, they are rarely examined through representative survey data that capture not only network structure but also people’s subjective experiences of relationships and cohesion across entire societies. This gap reflects the considerable technical and methodological challenges involved in measuring society‑wide networks through surveys. PATCHWORK addresses this challenge by developing and applying innovative survey‑based approaches to estimate acquaintanceship networks and link them directly to attitudes, trust, and experiences of cohesion and exclusion.

PATCHWORK develops a ground‑breaking network‑scientific approach to social cohesion. Starting from a theoretical framework for the structural cohesion of societies, the project advances a new empirical methodology by hybridising two strands of network research in an unprecedented way. This methodology is implemented in a large‑scale, cross‑national European survey administered to representative samples in four countries. The resulting survey data are analysed directly using statistical network‑scientific approaches to examine patterns of acquaintanceship and social exposure across societies. In addition, the survey estimates are used to simulate society‑wide networks, enabling further exploration of emergent social structures. These structures then inform agent‑based models (ABM), which allow us to examine in more depth how broad social networks shape subjective manifestations of cohesion. Complementing this quantitative approach, the project also draws on in‑depth interviews to better understand how people experience their networks, how these networks evolve over time, and how they relate to social contexts and attitudes toward other social groups.

The project will give us a new understanding of how cohesive broad acquaintanceship networks are across potential fault lines of citizenship, social class, religion, and political orientation for five societies, how real-life social relationships cluster to form network constellations that expose individuals in unique ways to other social groups, and how these constellations shape subjective manifestations of cohesion such as tolerance, trust, and acceptance of diversity.

Learn more about our research

Introducing PATCHWORK: A short video

How can personal networks shape social cohesion? This short animated video introduces the core ideas behind the PATCHWORK research project, explaining in an accessible way how broad acquaintanceship networks connect individuals within societies and why they matter for social cohesion.
(Click on the image below to watch the video on Vimeo.)

Video credits: Concept and narrative development by PATCHWORK members Nigel van Herwijnen, Núria Targarona Rifa, and Zhiyi Jin, in collaboration with artist Paula Planas (animation and production). Narration by William McGee. Audio recorded at Jack ’N Dial Studio by José Cisternas Rojas.

 

Find PATCHWORK online

PATCHWORK maintains project pages on OSF and GitHub, and shares updates via our lab's pages on LinkedIn and BlueSky.

 

 

Research group

The project is embedded in the COALESCE Lab of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The COALESCE Lab is an interdisciplinary research team that examines how social ties shape exclusion, cohesion, and polarization. These processes are inherently relational, yet much existing research treats them as individual attributes or infers them from digital platforms. The COALESCE Lab challenges this tendency by studying social structure directly, combining network theory with innovative empirical approaches to generate evidence on how relationships contribute to social fragmentation or, alternatively, to solidarity and cohesion.

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 101020038). The sole responsibility for the content of this website lies with the authors. It does not necessarily represent the opinion of the European Union. The European Research Council is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.