Close personal friends; typically the people one goes to in times of great crisis (if one has lost a job, or has marital problems, or has a severe health problem) and needs personal support.

(also called generalized trust) A well-tested question that asks how much strangers can be tested, typically of the form: 'which comes closer to your views, people can generally be trusted or you can’t be too careful in dealing with others?'

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  See directed social networks.

  Social ties that link people together with others who are primarily like them along some key dimension. For example, a group that meets of 50-year old African American men. [In reality some groups are bonding in some ways and bridging in others: for example, the Knights of Columbus is bonding with respect to religion, but bridging across social c [..]

  Social ties that link people together with others across a cleavage that typically divides society (like race, or class, or religion).

(from social networks literature) A measure of how important a node (actor) is to connecting members of a social network, i.e., the degree to which a node (or actor) is a 'sociometric star' or 'isolate'. The formulas for this vary depending on whether one is talking about directed (asymmetric) social networks or undirected (symm [..]

  As distinct from a truly active membership organization (where members regularly meet, and elect representatives), a check-writing organization is one where most members' membership consists of writing a check to that organization for annual dues. 'Check-writing organizations' are often headquartered in Washington, DC, and staffed [..]

(from social networks literature) Can be seen as the opposite of structural holes. The degree of likelihood that everyone in a network knows everyone else in the network, or the likelihood that if A knows B and B knows C that A knows C. Can also see this as the degree of connectedness of a social network.

(from social networks literature) The degree to which a social network can be defined by clear sub-networks. For example, if all the employees at a company over age 45 hung out together and all the employees under age 45 hung out together, there would be clustering of the network around age.