From Grass-Roots to Digital Ties:
A Case Study
Paolo Parigi, Stanford University
Rachel Gong, Stanford University
Paper for the ECPR Conference, University of Iceland. August 25-27, 2011
Most definitions of “social movements” emphasize the idea of contention (Della Porta and Diani
1999). For example, Tarrow writes that social movements are contentious networks capable of
sustaining challenges to powerful opponents (1996). For Tilly, social movements are organized,
historical actors that use contingent repertoires to protest against authority (1978, 1985). For
these scholars, social movements are contentious because they promote change. Yet, change
sometimes occurs without contention as Weber, Heinz, and DeSoucey documented for the case
of grass-fed meat and dairy products, where organizations and activists created a new economic
object through the sharing of cultural codes (2008). At other times, changes occur endogenously
from key actors operating within a particular field (Rao, Monin, and Durand 2003).
Among scholars of social movements, the emphasis on contentious tactics has had two
major effects. First, it has confined attention to movements that target the state. Second, it has
treated the emergence of the Internet (and in particular the role of the social media tools of Web
2.0) as an epiphenomenon in the study of how social movements work. In this paper we move
away from the contentious approach to show that change can be pursued with several tactics and
that, therefore, movements do not necessarily have to target the state to be recognized as such.
Because we think that movements do not have to be contentious, the argument we develop in this
paper also offers a framing for analyzing the impact of the Internet in the working of movements.
From this perspective, we think that a more apt definition of social movements is given in
Alexander (2006). He writes: Social movements… can be seen as devices that construct
translations between the discourse of civil society and the institution-specific processes of a more
particularistic type” (233). In this process of “translation”, the Internet plays a crucial role. While
it is the case that the type of activism that the Internet promotes involves activities with lower
risks (at least in Western democratic states), it does not necessary follow that the Internet fosters
1
exclusively a type of activism that is characterized by low-level commitment. Currently, the
marginality of the Internet is implicitly built on an argument that sees high level of commitment
related to the risks associated with collective action. “Strong ties formed between activists
battling together against the state”, it is the sort of hidden assumption of much of this literature.
In this paper we show that this is not the case, that strong ties between activists, i.e., high levels
of commitment, do not require risks and that the Internet is crucial for creating a process of
meaning-making that joins people together (Melucci 1985).
Data from our analysis come from an on-line survey conducted on an organization named
Transition United States, a community of activists scattered throughout the country and mainly
concerned with issues of environment protection and minimizing energy dependence (Mooallem
2009). Because of the non-random nature of our data and the little generalization that comes
from a case study, our conclusions about the use of non-contentious tactics and of the Internet
within movements are necessarily tentative. Nevertheless, we think that what we have found is of
sufficient interest to call the attention of other scholars to the study of a new type of social
movement that is non-contentious in nature and heavily embedded in the Internet in their daily
activities.
Literature Review and Research Questions
The majority of social movement scholars see social movements as organizations pursuing
changes through contentious tactics (Tarrow 1996; Della Porta and Diani 1999). Movements are
contentious because the changes that they pursue are opposed by a state that is instead broadly
seen as the defender of the status quo (Davenport 2007). So central is the assumption of conflict
(Lichbach 1987) that, for example, scholars usually assume that activists have a constant desire
to use protest as a tactic, allowing only the available resources for such tactics to vary (Minkoff
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1993). In plain words, the more resources a social movement can access, the more intense the
level of confrontation with the state. While the pursuit of change is evidently a fundamental part
of collective action (McAdam and Snow 1997), making the use of contentious tactics a
requirement for achieving change may work well for explaining the behavior of French activists
(see the work of Tilly on the “contentious French” [1986]), but it seems to pose unnecessary
limits to analysis. Social movements resort to contentious tactics because they engage in a zerosum game for change with the sole institutional actor that owns the monopoly of the legitimate
use of violence, i.e., the state.
Collective action, however, can spring up outside of the polity and in such cases it does
not necessarily use contentious tactics (Alexander 2006). Di Maggio and Louch (1998), for
example, considered the market as a potential locus for collective action in their analysis of how
consumer decisions are influenced by friendship and kinship. Weber et al. similarly looked at the
alliances formed between activists and producers to create a new cultural object of locally grown
grass-fed meat and dairy products (Weber et al. 2008). At other times, change takes place
endogenously, emerging from established actors within a particular market. This is what Rao et
al. documented in the account of the transformation of French cusine in the 1970s (Rao et al.
2003). These examples break the assumption of change and contentious tactics but are focused
mainly on economic transactions occurring in the market. Regardless of where they operate, can
social movements pursue change without conflict?
A possible answer to the question comes from a classification of movements that Aberle
suggested in 1966 (but see also McAdam and Snow 1997, Snow and Soule 2009 for essentially
the same scheme). Aberle (1966) distinguished between the amount of change a movement was
pursuing, i.e., whether the movement was seeking to reform part of society or all of it, and the
3
locus of this change, i.e., whether the movement sought to effect changes at the level of the
individual or at the level of the broader social structure. In the table below we follow Abele’s
classification but with the caveat that, for us, the broader social structure means the institutions
that organize the state, the economy, a given culture or a combination thereof.
Table 1 about here
The key question for movements that target the individual (left column in the table
above) is whether the changes they advocate for can amount to collective action. More
importantly for the present discussion, movements of this type are rarely contentious since they
focus on the individual rather than on the state. At least for redemptive movements (bottom left
cell), evidence suggests that despite the use of non-contentious tactics their collective actions are
still capable of promoting large changes. In fact, one has only to consider the impact of various
religious movements on politics (e.g. the Religious Right) or of consumer campaigns on
corporate branding and social responsibility (e.g. the Fair Trade movement) (Micheletti 2003;
Micheletti and McFarland 2010; Forno and Ceccarini 2006) to understand the structural impact
of social movements powered by lifestyle changes at the individual level.
In the case at hand, Transition United States (Transition US, hereafter) challenges
individuals to begin social change by changing their own behaviors rather than by campaigning
for policy changes. Transition US represents a perfect example of a redemptive movement, one
that seeks total social change by targeting individual change. Its intention is that enough
individual changes in knowledge, values, and behavior will lead to the formation of local
collectives with organized action plans, which will then lead to structural changers further up the
chain, finally resulting in a complete reorganization of governance and policy. Thus, it should be
noted that even at the individual level and despite the lack of direct contentiousness, participation
4
in the Transition US movement comes at a high cost. A radical shift in values and behavior is
required in order for an individual, let alone a community, to wean oneself off dependence on
commercial energy. However, because the shift occurs at the individual level, conflict is not
necessarily a tactic used to promote change.
Relaxing the assumption that movements pursue change only through conflict brings to
focus the key theoretical question of how the Internet has changed collective action in the last 15
years. When we talk about the Internet, we focus on the social media tools of Web 2.0, rather
than the whole electronic network. Scholarly work indicates that the Internet has had a large
impact on how social movements share information and recruit new members (e.g. Howard
2010), how they attract publicity (e.g. Perlmutter 2008), how they organize offline action and
events (e.g. Shirky 2008), and how they take direct online action (e.g. Earl and Kimport 2011).
Indeed, there is evidence that the Internet appears to have dramatically altered how social
movements operate (Joyce 2010). Yet within the paradigm of “contentious politics” the role of
the Internet remains puzzlingly marginal, thereby creating a strange disconnect between practices
and theorizations about these practices.
A large part of this disconnect is rooted in the distinction between weak and strong ties.
According to this line of reasoning, strong ties between activists are viewed as sources of both
positive and negative incentive in recruiting new members in contentious movements where risks
are high (McVeigh 2009; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001a). Weak ties, on the other hand, are
seen to facilitate low-risk activism, particularly of the "slacktivism" type dismissed by Gladwell
(2010). Consequently, the role of the Internet is considered marginal since it appears to foster not
collective actions that pursue change (read, via conflict) but coordinated actions that remain
5
confined at the individual level. This difference is illustrated by the gulf that separates a
movement like Freedom Summer (McAdam 1999) from flash mobs.
Yet, much has changed since the mid 1980s. While it is important to differentiate
coordinated actions occurring via the Internet from collective actions geared toward promoting
change, it is equally important to consider the type of mobilization space that the Internet has
constructed. Doing so will bring to focus the implicit assumption that strong ties between
activists are rooted in the risks associated with collective action. A movement of the redemptive
type is the perfect case to test the relationship between the strength of activist ties and the
Internet because it challenges the assumption connecting risk and structural changes. To the
extent that a redemptive movement promotes change, activists are called to show commitment
and therefore to develop strong ties with other activists. However, because redemptive
movements are powered by lifestyle changes, the risks associated with such movements are
considerably lower compared to reformative or transformative movements. For example,
Transition US incorporates as tactics artistic expression, such as poetry and music, with
individual and small scale collective action such as planting gardens and "reskilling" classes
aimed at teaching people sustainable skills such as darning socks (Mooallem 2009). From a
contentious perspective, the use of these tactics suggests the reduced importance of strong ties
since there is little risk associated with writing poems as compared to taking to the streets.
In a seminal work, Bearman and Everett argued that the tactics of a movement are closely
related to the position of the movements in a network of other social movement organizations
(1993). While they fell short of breaking the assumption regarding contentiousness, we furthered
their intuition and argued that, in movements of the redemptive type, lifestyle changes can be
seen as a new tactical repertoire. This implies that strong ties can develop in the absence of risk
6
on the basis of the commitment activists have toward collectively reaching the advertised
(individual) changes. From this perspective, commitment becomes the salient dimension for
creating strong ties because it colors otherwise ordinary actions with a different, purposeful
meaning. The Internet becomes crucial because it activates a process of what Melucci called
meaning-making, i.e., a process that sustains collective action because it generates a shared
identity through the circulation of ideas, in the form of blogs, pictures, music, etc. (1985).
In sum, we used our data about Transition US to answer two related questions. First, what
are the characteristics of a movement of the redemptive type? Second, has the Internet created a
new base on which strong ties can be developed in the absence of risk? Our goal is not to create
another typology of social movements but to bring the theoretical scaffolding about social
movements closer to the practices of activists.
Methods
Data Collection
We used an online survey to collect data on users of the following website: transitionus.ning.com
(now transitioninaction.com). This website is a social networking website whose members have
joined voluntarily and expressed interest in the Transition U.S. movement, regardless of their
actual level of involvement in Transition activities.
A large banner announcement about the survey was prominently posted on the website,
containing information about the study and a link to the study website, which contained the link
to the survey. Members of the social networking website also received an email inviting them to
participate and directing them to the study website. Hosted on a secure and reliable server, the
survey contained 54 questions, comprising a mix of multiple-choice questions and free response
questions. Respondents were allowed to save their responses, stop, and return to complete the
survey at any time from October 2009 to March 2010. Overall, 387 respondents began the
7
survey, and 243 completed it. At the time, the website had approximately 2,500 members, so the
final sample, although non-random, represents approximately 10% of total membership.
Survey questions were divided into four categories. The first and largest category of
questions pertained to respondent's activities within the Transition movement. This included
what role they occupied within their local group (initiator or joiner), what activities they
participated in both as individuals (e.g. grow their own food or use their car less) and as
members of the group (e.g. raised funds for group activities or organized a group event). These
activities included how they used the internet, for example, to stay informed about group
activities, for personal communication, or for social networking. The second category of
questions was related to respondents' political attitudes and previous experiences. Respondents
were asked what other political or voluntary activities they had participated in prior to joining the
Transition movement, and were asked to explain their interest in or motivation for joining the
Transition movement. The third category of questions described respondents' social networks.
Respondents were asked to name five close friends and describe their means and frequency of
interaction with those friends. Finally, the fourth category of questions consisted of demographic
controls, such as gender, age, education and income. Although data on race were also collected,
the homogeneity of the sample with respect to race limited the usefulness of this variable.
Descriptive Statistics
Survey data show respondents to be homogenous with respect to race (91% are white), education
(87% have at least a bachelor’s degree), and political preferences (74% describe themselves as
politically liberal), with women making up 58% of the sample. As a whole, respondents are websavvy, using the internet for email, work, reading the news, social networking, online
discussions, and blogging.
8
All but eight people (97%) are registered voters, and more than half have ever belonged
to an environmental group or political/civic organization, with over 80% having attended a
political/civic event. However, their responses to survey questions also indicate that they are
dissatisfied with traditional means of political participation, such as street rallies and letter
writing. Instead, they perceive community organizing as the most effective way to bring about
social change, deprioritizing connections to local government. They generally distrust business
corporations and political parties, and explain their withdrawal from political/civic organizations
as the result of the failure of institutional organizations and means.
Table 2 about here
Logit Model Variables
We used maximum likelihood estimates of logistic regression models to predict the likelihood
that a respondent was an initiator of a local Transition group. The dependent variable took a
binary value, where initiator = 1 and non-initiator = 0. The basic model, Model1, considered the
predictive value of the spread of a respondent's social network, namely the average distance from
his or her five closest friends. This distance variable was constructed from an original variable
measuring how far away a respondent lived from each of his or her five closest friends. This
variable took four categorical values that were then assigned point values with 1 being the
closest and 4 the furthest and averaged over the five friends to yield a continuous distance
variable that was used in the model.
Model2 further considers the effects of variation in internet use while controlling for the
possible confounding effects of having a social network that is largely active online. An index
measuring internet use was constructed as the sum of use of the internet for email, work, news,
discussion forums, and social networking, thus its value ranged from 0-5. A count of the number
of friends with whom the respondent interacted with mainly online (as opposed to in person or
9
via telephone) was used to control for the size of a close online network. This variable also
ranged from 0-5.
The final model, Model3, tests for the effects of how a respondent first heard about the
Transition movement. For this purpose, we included a binary variable measuring whether or not
a respondent first heard about the movement via the internet (yes = 1). All the models also
controlled for the influence of demographic variables of age, gender, a college degree, and
annual family income.
A redemptive movement: Goals and Tactics
A key characteristic of a redemptive movement is a primary focus on individual change. As
previously described, activists in this type of movement see societal change as a consequence of
changes at the individual level rather than the other way around. This bottom-up perspective
makes targeting the government, or more broadly the state, a secondary goal of the movement.
Becoming part of a redemptive movement means adding a political dimension to actions that,
from outside the movement, appear private and apolitical. It is the embedding of politics in
everyday life that distinguishes membership in redemptive movements from membership in
more traditional movements.
The next two tables present the three most common lifestyle changes that activists in
Transition US have adopted since becoming involved with the organization (top table) and the
top three changes they influenced other people to make (bottom table). Respondents were asked
to rank a battery of choices and the answers presented in the tables below are the three highest
ranked. Thus, 51% of respondents reported growing their own food as the first change that they
have adopted since becoming involved with Transition US, while 47% respondents reported this
action as the number one way they were able to influence others.
10
Tables 3 and 4 about here
Respondents appeared very consistent in the ranking of their choices—both growing their
own food and driving less were among the most popular changes that activists adopted and
promoted. Furthermore, 42% of the respondents also listed introducing themselves to unknown
neighbors as a relevant change that membership in Transition US catalyzed. Externally, none of
these actions has a political dimension per se. Yet, this type of action, intensely focused on the
individual, was the bread and butter of Transition US mobilization. For these activists, at least,
humble activities such as gardening shifted from being a quintessentially private action to the
pinnacle of political activism.
Respondents were also aware that their type of activism was different from that of other
movements. Members of Transition US attributed little importance to the more traditional ways
of pursuing change. Asked to list the priorities of their local Transition US chapter and their
current activities, respondents reported that engaging with other organizations and with the
government were among the least of their relevant priorities.
Tables 5 and 6 about here
Instead, the tables above demonstrate that the top two goals of the movement were building selfreliance and increasing the well-being of the community. Moreover, the majority of respondents
reported that their current activities were mostly geared toward raising community awareness.
The irrelevance given to more standard activism was not due to political apathy: 97% of
the respondents in our sample reported being registered to vote; 82% said that they have
participated in a political or civic event and, even more telling, 76% reported having donated
money to a political or civic organization. A politically disenfranchised sample, this was not!
11
Transition US members chose to engage in certain actions because they shared a deep
sense of frustration with traditional activism. This is what a 57 year-old white male said: “I’ve
left organizations that attempted to make the government change, or were more about protesting
what they didn’t want. I prefer to co-create what we DO want” (emphasis in the original). A
middle-aged female respondent said, “I have to focus my resources and energy on things that are
effective and local. Most political efforts are a waste of time at this point.” Because of their
dislike of traditional activism, members of Transition US chose the type of tactics that they
thought were more effective for promoting change.
Tilly showed the importance of the connection between the goals of the movement and
the type of tactics activists use to pursue these goals (Tilly 1978c). However, he focused
exclusively on contentious tactics. The two quotes above emphasize how turning the focus away
from government and toward the individual made Transition US adopt non-contentious tactics to
promote change. As a 26-year-old male respondent reported: “Adversarial activism is out, social
process activism is in…” Non-contentious tactics represent a significant way in which
redemptive movements differ from other types of movements. Indeed, 64% of our respondents
reported that the most effective tactic to promote change was “community organizing”. More
traditional forms of activism, such as street railing, campaigning for politicians, and writing
letters to Congressmen, were selected between 1% and 4% of the time.
Although their actions were private and non-contentious, the tables above show clearly
that members of Transition US saw themselves as activists whose goal was to promote societal
change by changing the lifestyle of one individual at a time.
Strong ties and the Internet
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Previous research has shown that social movement organizers formed strong ties with other
activists within the movement and that these ties function to reinforce the sense of commitment
that organizers feel toward the goals of the movement. However we know little of how the
Internet, and in particular the social media tools of Web 2.0, has impacted organizers' interaction
with other members of the movement. For example, in redemptive movements where collective
action involves little risks, it may be the case that the Internet has operated toward further
reducing the salience of strong ties. If the coordination of individual activities is all that is
needed in a redemptive movement, social media tools can generate coordination at the expense
of strong ties and without necessarily reducing the level of commitment that organizers feel
toward the goals of the movement. Because Transition US relies heavily on the Internet, it
appears a well-suited case for a first attempt to shed light on how networks of organizers have
changed in the digital era.
The table below shows that organizers are embedded in networks that look different from
those of other activists that joined an already existing chapter of Transition US (joiners). In our
sample, we identified as organizers those respondents that reported having started a local chapter
of Transition US. While the majority of people with whom joiners reported interacting most
often was not involved in Transition US, for organizers the proportion was split half and half.
Organizers also had on average more friends in the movement (1.93) than joiners (1.15). More
importantly, organizers differed in how they used the Internet—out of 127 respondents that
initiated a chapter, 60% reported staying informed about Transition US mainly through local
meetings while the majority of joiners stayed informed about the movement using the Internet.
Table 7 about here
13
This suggests that despite the low risk involved in starting a new chapter of Transition
US, on-line interactions had not displaced the importance of strong ties as a vehicle for activism.
Strong ties appeared also to have played a role in how future organizers were recruited in the
movement. In fact, while 36% of the respondents that joined an existing chapter of Transition US
reported having heard of it via the Internet, the same proportion for organizers was 21%. To test
in a more comprehensive way the role of strong ties we used a logit model to predict the
likelihood of being an organizer on the basis of the respondent’s use of the Internet and
controlling for a host of other factors.
Table 8 about here
In Model1 most of the predictors are not significant with the exception of the average
distance from the five closest friends—organizers were more likely to live closer to their friends
compared to joiners. Everything else equal, the predicted probabilities of being an organizer in
 e −.41 
our sample of respondents, 
−.41  = .39, go down almost 10% at the most (.39/4, see
 (1+ e ) 
Gelman and Hill 2006), for a unit increase in the average distance from the respondent’s closest
circle of friends. Since Table XXX indicated that initiators have more friends within Transition
US, the finding from Model 1 reinforces the idea that organizers preferred using strong ties to
maintain contact within the movement.
Model 2 tests directly initiators' familiarity with the Internet. We employed an additive
index to capture the salience of the Internet, ranging between 1, a respondent that used the
internet only for emails, and 5, somebody that used the internet for email, work, news, discussion
forums and social networking. For a unit increase in this index, Model 2 says that the odds of
being an organizer go up by 43%. In other words, organizers used social media tools more
extensively compared to joiners. Indirectly, this validates the importance of the Internet for
14
Transition US activists. Finally Model 3 brings everything together and shows that despite the
fact that organizers used the Internet a lot more compared with joiners, they were less likely to
have heard of Transition US via the Internet. That is, organizers got information about the
movement via face-to-face, and, we infer, stronger ties. The significance of this latter coefficient
is lower than the others due to the small sample size.
The analysis of organizers of Transition US indicates that high levels of commitment
were still sustained by face-to-face interactions. As with contentious movements where the risks
associated with the collective action are high, organizers of this redemptive movement appear to
prefer and to use strong ties in their interactions with other activists. In this case, however, we
attribute the preference for strong ties to be associated with high levels of commitment to
movement goals rather than high levels of risk. Rather significantly, our analysis shows that
strong ties remained the channel through which organizers were more likely to be recruited into
the movement.
Conclusion
This paper used an old theoretical classification of social movements to theoretically argue that
the use of contentious tactics is not the only method through which activists pursue change. We
documented the characteristics of a sample of activists that used non-contentious tactics to
promote change at the individual level. We focused in particular on the organizers of a
movement called Transition US to see how the Internet has changed the salience of face-to-face,
strong, interactions. Theoretical work on social movements implicitly relates the existence of
strong ties between activists to the level of risk associated with collective action. As a
consequence the role of the Internet as a fundamental factor shaping contemporary activism is
largely lost in this literature since the Internet tends to promote movements that do not target the
15
state and are therefore less likely to use contentious tactics. The immediate implications of this
line of reasoning for our study were that weak ties should have been the predominant type of
relationships connecting members of Transition US. We found none of that. Instead, as for the
case of contentious movements, strong ties remained salient.
We used the result about the importance of strong ties to suggest that a novel approach to
understand the role of the Internet in mobilization lies in seeing the Internet as a creator of
meaning and, therefore, of commitment. Rather than risk, it is commitment that then becomes the
base for the emergence of strong ties between organizers. We call this type of ties digital
because, similar to the case of relationships between members of grass-roots organizations, they
imply a deep substratum of shared meaning. We think that it is the Internet that provides the
basis for this shared meaning. Yet, because of the non-random nature of our sample and the fact
that we concentrated the analysis on only one movement, the broad implications of our argument
need to be taken with a grain of salt. Further research is in need. We think that this research
should move the theorization about social movements closer to the current practices of activists.
16
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Tables
Table 1: Types of social movements
Locus of change
Amount of change
Individual
Social Structure
Partial
Alterative
Reformative
Total
Redemptive
Transformative
19
Table 2. Respondents' political profile
Variables
Registered to vote
Ever attended a political/civic event
Ever participated politically
Ever donated money to a political/civic organization
Ever belonged to an environmental group
Ever belonged to a service group
Ever belonged to a political club
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010 (N=243)
"Yes"
N
235
200
196
185
198
112
90
%
97
82
81
76
81
46
37
20
Table 3. Top three Transition activists' lifestyle changes
Lifestyle Changes
Grows own food
Uses car less
Introduced self to previously unknown neighbors
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010 (N=243)
Count
N
124
118
101
%
51
49
42
Table 4. Top three Transition activists' influence on others
Influenced Others To:
Grow their own food
Join a local food group
Use their car less
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010 (N=243)
Count
N
114
82
69
%
47
34
28
21
Table 5. Priorities of Local Transition Groups
Priorities
Local interests (self-reliance, community building, local
economy, public health and well-being)
Environmental concerns (peak oil and climate change)
Building links to other organizations and government
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010 (N=239)
Considered most important
N
207
%
87
24
8
10
3
Table 6. Activities of Local Transition Groups
Activities
Awareness-raising and community engagement
Food and gardening activities
Building links with other organizations
Energy saving activities
Business and economic activities
Building connections with local government officials
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010 (N=211)
Count
N
106
76
16
7
3
3
%
44
31
7
3
1
1
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Table 7. Cross Tabulations Comparing Local Transition Group Initiators And Joiners
Variables
Joiners
Initiators
Stays informed about Transition most frequently via (N = 225):
Local meetings
Internet
Print material
29
60
9
77
42
8
Spends more free time with (N = 225):
Other Transition activists
People not involved in Transition
24
74
64
63
Average number of close friends involved in Transition
1.15
1.93
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010
*Respondents selected the "other" checkbox and answered "I started it" (referring to the local
group) instead of saying how they first heard of the movement in general
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Table 8. Coefficients from the Logistic Regression of Initiator on Predictor Variables
Variables
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
Age
0.02
0.03*
0.03*
Female
0.04
0.21
0.19
At least college degree
-0.09
-0.25
-0.29
2008 family income
0.06
0.08±
0.08±
Average distance from 5 closest friends
-0.41*
-0.40*
-0.39±
Friends online (count from 0-5)
-0.18
-0.22
Net use index (sum of 0-5)
0.36*
0.40*
First heard about Transition online
-0.63±
Intercept
0.16
-1.49
-1.43
Likelihood χ (compared to null model) -106.63
-103.50
-102.11
Degrees of freedom
6
8
9
AIC
225.3
223.0
221.5
Data source: Transition U.S. Ning Survey 2010 (N = 163)
* p<.05 (two-tailed test), ± p<.1 (two-tailed test)
Note: Net use index is a sum of use of the web for email, work, news, discussion forums, and
social networking.
24