Expressions of community
Structural features – social density of interactions, physical density of proximity, abundance of others with shared group characteristics – create the conditions for the existence of a community. How individuals outwardly express and subjectively experience community relates to those structural features. This dissertation investigates and compares two hypotheses about that relationship. First, structural and contextual characteristics could be co-constitutive with expressive and subjective ones, a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Alternatively, expressions of community might substitute or stand in for the structural elements that promote togetherness and belonging. The tension between these possibilities is especially relevant for members of marginalized and minoritized identity categories, like LGBTQ identities, who cannot take acceptance and belonging for granted.
To investigate this theoretical tension, I triangulate across three quantitative and computational case studies of LGBTQ communities:
- In the first empirical chapter, I use text from an early LGBTQ virtual community to examine whether, when LGBTQ people talk about community, what they mean invokes a belonging- and social organization-oriented sense of the concept to a greater extent than in more general contexts. I show that discourse in the soc.motss Usenet group uses “community” in the sense of Gemeinschaft to at least an equal extent as generic English-language text.
- In the second chapter, I ask whether dense places full of LGBTQ people facilitate a greater sense of connection to the LGBTQ community, or whether community becomes ambient in those contexts. I find that small-area abundance of same-sex couples, and to a lesser extent overall density, is associated with greater sense of community connectedness for LGBQ people.
- In the third chapter, I look at whether, in virtual communities organized around LGBTQ identities, core or peripheral members engage in more talk about community. I show significant heterogeneity in the relationship between interaction network centrality and expressions of community talk in a set of 11 LGBTQ groups on Reddit, a contemporary virtual platform.
Overall, this work connects contextual features to how LGBTQ individuals outwardly express and subjectively experience community, through their language, group participation, and self-reports of belonging. Across the work, I find that experiences of community are most intense and expressions of community most frequent, not for peripheral members of LGBTQ communities but for the most central. Something beyond stigma animates the attractive force of community for LGBTQ people.
Digital traces of sexualities
When do people disclose their sexualities on social media? What can that tell us about sexual identity online?
In collaboration with Ridhi Kashyap, I use aggregate estimates from Facebook's advertising platform to investigate the disclosure of sexuality on social media in the United States. We leverage variation by relationship status, age, and gender to see which factors are associated with the disclosure of LGB or straight sexual orientations. We interpret these variations in sexuality disclosure on social media to primarily reflect sexual identity, intersected in some cases with sexual availability.
Gilroy, Connor and Ridhi Kashyap. 2021. “Digital Traces of Sexualities: Understanding the Salience of Sexual Identity through Disclosure on Social Media.” Socius 7: 1–18. doi: 10.1177/23780231211029499
Change in gay neighborhoods
How do gayborhoods change in a time of rising social acceptance?
Gay neighborhoods are meaningful spaces for LGBTQ people, who worry that these spaces are assimilating and gentrifying as LGBTQ people integrate into US society. I show that evidence for widespread gayborhood change is actually quite limited. I webscrape a set of digital gay bar listings to identify gay neighborhoods across over 20 cities, then examine change in these places across several demographic and economic indicators using the American Community Survey.
Open-access full text of MA thesis
Other projects
I have also used agent-based modeling to simulate the impact of coming out on public opinion and used regularized regression models that incorporated scores based on surveys of variable importance for prediction in the Fragile Families Challenge.
Salganik, Matthew J., Ian Lundberg, Alexander T. Kindel, [and 109 others, including Connor Gilroy]. 2020. “Measuring the Predictability of Life Outcomes with a Scientific Mass Collaboration.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(15):8398–8403. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1915006117
Filippova, Anna, Connor Gilroy, Ridhi Kashyap, Antje Kirchner, Allison C. Morgan, Kivan Polimis, Adaner Usmani, and Tong Wang. 2019. “Humans in the Loop: Incorporating Expert and Crowdsourced Knowledge for Predictions using Social Survey Data.” Socius 5: 1–15. doi: 10.1177/2378023118820157. (corresponding author)